Throughout the Second World War, there were many evil women guards who served inside of
the concentration camps. Most of them were known for their immense brutality and evil,
and they worked in sites such as Ravensbruck, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. One of the most
notorious women to have a fearsome reputation during the war was Irma Grese, a young 22
year old woman who would be executed at the end of the war. She was the youngest woman
to die under British law in the 20th century, and she was known as the Beautiful Beast,
or the Hyena of Auschwitz. Grese was considered one of the worst guards, and she was someone
who would not hesitate to encourage her dogs to attack inmates, and also she would use
her pistol to kill in cold blood. But after her execution, Grese’s remains were initially
interred close to the place of her execution, inside the prison yard near to where she crashed
through the trapdoor. However then less than a decade after her execution, one of the most
evil nazis was exhumed from her grave, and was buried elsewhere. Join us today as we
look at the exhumation of Irma Grese. Remember to support our channel, please make sure to
subscribe.
Irma Grese during her teenage years was desperate to join the League of German Girls, the Nazi
youth group for young women and teenage girls. It was similar to the Hitler Youth, but Irma’s
father banned her from joining this. However she attended behind her father’s back, along
with her sister and she became brainwashed by the Nazis politics. At the age of 144 she
left her school after she left home, and she worked as a farmhand for 6 months before she
worked in a shop in Luchen. She may have left home due to her father’s disapproval with
her involvement with the Nazi groups, but it was clear she was beginning to be a woman
who was obsessed with Hitler and the Nazis’ way of life. She initially was a quiet girl
who did not display violent tendencies, and she ran away from fights, however this would
change. In 1939 Irma Grese went to study nursing at the Hohenlynchen Hospital where many SS
members went to convalesce, and she trained under Karl Gebhardt, a horrific nazi doctor.
Gebhardt would be involved in a number of sadistic nazi experiments inside of the concentration
camps, but Grese rubbed shoulders with many SS members and other virulent Nazis. But she
was told that she would not make it as a nurse there, and she was deemed not good enough
and she was told to look for other work elsewhere. But Karl Gebhardt had informed one of his
friends at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp that Grese had potential, and despite being
told to come back 6 months later when she was 18, she became a female guard at Ravensbruck.
At the time she had to pass a number of exams, but she became one of around 2500 women who
would serve inside of female concentration camps during the Second World War. She was
hired to train as a guard, and she went through the training routine, and she was told and
forced into becoming a brute. It’s believed on her first day that she actually apologised
to an inmate, but then she was told how to deal correctly with this sort of incident,
whipping and beating the prisoner. Grese continued to work at Ravensbruck, and she became known
for her beatings which she administered on women there, but when she was just 19 it was
time for her to move elsewhere. Irma received instruction that she was to be transferred
to Auschwitz, and because of this she was sent to the largest concentration camp established
in the Third Reich, to help guard over the large female prisoner deportations that would
arrive there. When she got to Auschwitz she was assigned to the women’s camp of Birkenau,
the main extermination site where the gas chambers killed thousands. Her duties included
commanding the gardening squad, working on telephone exchanges, and also being in control
of the post room. But in May 1944 she became an oberaufserein, and she was commanding over
30,000 women prisoners in Birkenau’s B22/C camp. In this role she became horrifically
brutal, and she was known for wearing her heavy boots, carrying her pistol on her and
her whip with her at all times. Grese was known as ‘The beautiful beast, or the blond
angel of hell, and she tormented the women constantly. A former doctor of the camp said,
‘She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her face has an angelic clarity
and her blue eyes were the liveliest and most innocent eyes imaginable.’ Another prisoner
said, ‘It defied belief, that such a pretty girl could be so cruel. When she walked through
the camp with a whip in her hand, she was surrounded by a cloud of choice perfume.’
She would attack the women using this whip, and sometimes would beat them to death.
She also had a role in medical experiments, and one former doctor of Auschwitz said, ‘“Irma
Grese invariably arrived to watch the operation, kicking the victim if her screams interfered
with her pleasure and giving herself completely to the spasms which shook her entire body
and made saliva run down from the corner of her mouth.” It’s clear she was also a
sadist, and she was also a murderer and she would shoot prisoners indiscriminately if
they were not working hard enough. She also encouraged her dog to attack prisoners, and
during one incident she was on a bike with her dog next to her, and any prisoner who
could not keep up with a 16km walk was mauled by the dog. One witness said of her behaviour,
‘We were loading the lories. Before noon we had an unexpected visitor: Aufseherin Irma
with her two leashed dogs, Frau Aufseherin Irma, blonde, with an angel face and snake
eyes, the camp’s chief torturer. We were very careful not to attract her attention.
We pushed and pushed. It seemed to take an eternity to roll the car over the hill.
“The next team was unable to coordinate its efforts. They were completely unnerved
by our visitor. They hesitated and lost control of their wagon. It swayed, bowled down the
hill, and capsized, scattering stone over the whole area. “The prisoners were completely
broken, in spirit. Aufsherin Irma sicced the two police dogs on them. The girls tried to
escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily overtook them. One grabbed a Polish
woman who slipped on a rock. The other fell upon a Russian girl. At Irma’s orders, the
Kapos’ underlings beat and kicked the girls still untouched by the dogs. The Kapo [an
inmate overseer] wrote down the numbers of the delinquent team. “The dogs were tearing
at the girls’ bodies. Irma came closer to observe what they were doing. Her eyes were
bloodshot. The sight of the blood seemed to intoxicate her. She panted. She was excited—everybody
could see that. We stood in a trance, as at a gladiatorial combat.”
But one of her greatest crimes was that she was involved in prisoner selections, and she
would personally send thousands of children, women and men to their deaths inside of the
gas chambers. She would patrol the railyards selecting prisoners to die, and this would
later result in her own execution. She indulged in all aspects of the camps life, and even
had an SS boyfriend, and allegedly had an affair with the evil doctor Josef Mengele.
But as the Second World War was on-going and going against the Germans, Irma Grese was
transferred from Auschwitz along with a number of female prisoners with the Red Army on the
horizon. She was sent back to Ravsneburck for a short time, before in March 1945 she
arrived in Bergen Belsen. This was a concentration camp which was incredibly overcrowded and
was breaking down due to the huge amount of prisoners who were sent there. She was also
reunited at Belsen with many of her former SS guard friends including the Commandant,
Josef Kramer. Whilst at Belsen, Grese continued to demonstrate evil forcing inmates to stand
for long periods of time, and she also forced prisoners to stand with rocks held above their
heads. But she was still being brutal towards prisoners, even as the Allies were close by.
But she stayed at Belsen despite having the chance to flee, and she remained to keep law
and order, but then the British arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Irma Grese was not immediately
arrested, and she was forced to help bury 10,000 corpses which were lying all around
the camp. She was then arrested, and was held at a Wehrmacht tank training academy. She
said of her work, ‘It was our duty to exterminate anti social elements so that Germany’s future
would be assured.’ She was then brought to trial and was charged with ill treatment,
execution, murder and barbarism at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Following a nine week trial,
she was sentenced to death by hanging, and she was one of only three female guards sentenced
to death during the Belsen trials.
Irma Grese was held inside of Hamelin prison, which would be a place where many former SS
guards would be executed inside of the execution chamber there. The night before her execution,
she sung Nazi songs early into the morning and on the 13th December 1945 she was then
to be killed. The women sentenced to death were executed individually and the men were
executed in pairs, and it was British executioner Albert Pierrepoint who conducted the execution.
Of Grese’s death it was said by Pierrepoint that, ‘We climbed the stairs to the cells
where the condemned were waiting. A German officer at the door leading to the corridor
flung open the door and we filed past the row of faces and into the execution chamber.
The officers stood at attention. Brigadier Paton-Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised.
He gave me the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber, I walked
into the corridor. 'Irma Grese', I called. The German guards quickly closed all grilles
on twelve of the inspection holes and opened one door. Irma Grese stepped out. The cell
was far too small for me to go inside, and I had to pinion her in the corridor. 'Follow
me,' I said in English, and O'Neil [sic] repeated the order in German. At 9.34 a.m. she walked
into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing round it, then walked
on to the centre of the trap, where I had made a chalk mark. She stood on this mark
very firmly, and as I placed the white cap over her head she said in her languid voice,
'Schnell'. [English translation: 'Quickly.’ The drop crashed down, and the doctor followed
me into the pit and pronounced her dead. After twenty minutes the body was taken down and
placed in a coffin ready for burial.
But this would not be the end of Irma Grese’s story. Her coffin was taken out of the execution
chamber, and she was then quickly buried next to the other executed former SS guards hastily
in the prison yard of Hamelin Prison. Just a stones throw away from the execution chamber,
she was buried in the prison which was under British control. However in 1955, Hamelin
Prison was scheduled to be closed and the prisoners were transferred to another prison
nearby. However the graves of the former nazi guards were then interred and this included
Irma Grese’ coffin. The graves were mass graves from which Grese’ coffin was exhumed,
and in 1950 the British had handed Hamelin back to the Germans. At the time there was
a significant amount of tension in German with right wing elements of the society, and
some of those groups wanted to give the evil guards such as Irma Grese, Johanna Bormann
and Josef Kramer a decent burial. But in March 1954 the authorities began to exhume the bodies
from the prison yard. They broke the ground and exhumed the remains and then specialists
identified them, and they identified the remains of Irma Grese. Her bones were then put inside
of a seperate coffin, and it was prepared for reburial in an individual plot. There
were 91 bodies which were exhumed, and they were then planned to be buried in consecrated
ground in Hamelin’s Am Wehl cemetery. This cemetery held the remains previously of former
WW1 soldiers. But it was then said that no memorials would be allowed onto the graves
of the exhumed former guards, but that wooden crosses would be allowed if the relatives
paid for them.
One newspaper article of the exhumation said, ‘British occupation authorities refused
to interfere with German authorities who moved the bodies from a mass grave to individual
plots in the city cemetery, after a campaign by neo-Nazi elements in Hamelin, Lower Saxony.
Thirty of the 90 bodies of the executed Nazi war criminals have already been moved from
a common mass grave near Hamelin and reinterred in the city’s cemetery. The remaining bodies
will be moved later. Among those reburied are Joseph Kramer, named the “Beast of Belsen”
by inmates of the notorious death camp, and Irma Grese, who hounded women prisoners at
Belsen. The World Jewish Congress issued a statement signed by its political secretary,
A. L. Easterman, severely criticizing the reburial of the “Beast of Belsen, ” who
starved beat and burned to death tens of thousands of Jewish and other camp inmates while he
commanded the prison, as well as the other Nazi criminals.
So what had happened is that Irma Grese’s body had been moved from Hamelin to a nearby
grave yard, and it was interred along with many other evil executed Nazi war criminals.
But as the years went on, many Neo-nazi groups would visit the grave site and hold rallies
and meetings there, and the wooden crosses that were put up at the site were huge in
their number. It was clear that Grese’s remains were sickeningly for some a tourist
trap, and in the 1980s the wooden crosses were removed and the gravesite just became
a grass field. It was marked next to a path, but recently there has been much effort to
instead commemorate the perpetrators of the concentration camps, to remember the victims
instead. With this Irma Grese’ resting place today is a grass field near to a path, and
no references to her remain nearby.
Irma Grese was a notorious and disgusting female SS concentration camp guard who was
known for her evil treatment of prisoners inside many different camps. She was a woman
who would be too eager to beat, brutalise and kill with her bare hands, and following
her execution she was exhumed from the place she was initially buried. Much is known about
her behaviour at places such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but the story of her exhumation
is one which is less known.
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