Execution of Irma Grese - The Hyena of Auschwitz - Nazi Guard at Auschwitz & Bergen-Belsen - WW2. Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October 1923. In 1936, when Irma was 13 years old, her mother committed suicide following the discovery of her husband’s affair with a local pub owner's daughter. She was then raised only by her father Alfred Grese, a devout Christian, who was very stern and strict with his children and would often used physical violence to discipline them.
Her criminal career in concentration camps began in July 1942 when she arrived in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
In March, 1943 Irma Grese was deployed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was located in German occupied Poland.
Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. It was patrolled by SS guards, including-after 1942-SS dog handlers.
During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
According to Irma’s sister Helene, when Irma was a little girl, she was frightened to stand up for herself, and would run away to avoid a fight. At Auschwitz however, Grese found herself for the first time in a position to strike people when they could not strike her back. And she enjoyed it.
Grese would become one of the most hated and feared guards in the camp and she owed her infamous nicknames "the Hyena of Auschwitz" and "the Beautiful Beast" to her cruelty and brutality. Grese was also reputed to be a sexual deviant, taking lovers from the male and female populace of Birkenau. She was also alleged to have had affairs with the infamous doctor Josef Mengele, as well as Josef Kramer, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Doctor Gisella Perl, former Auschwitz prisoner, said about Irma: “She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic, and her blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine. And yet Irma Grese was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across.”
In her memoir Five Chimneys, Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel writes that Grese had affairs not only with doctor Mengele but with many other Nazis as well. When it came time to select women for the gas chamber, Lengyel noted that Irma Grese would purposely pick out the beautiful female prisoners due to jealousy and spite.
However, there were female prisoners that Irma Grese was fond of. Such was a case of Nina Kaleska, then 16 years old, whom Grese told her that she looked like her sister Helene. Kaleska was used by Irma as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma held lesbian orgies in barracks and watched out so that nobody would interrupt them.
Grese had numerous affairs with female inmates and when she grew bored of them, she would select them for gas chamber to be killed.
She also beat her sexual subjects.
When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s advances toward him, he had to watch Irma dragging his naked girlfriend around the camp by the hair and then whipping her. After Grese tortured the woman he loved, she had the man shot and the woman sent to the camp brothel.
Justice finally caught up with Grese when she was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of September 1945.
On the 17th of November, The British Military tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death by hanging. She was 22 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on the 13th of December,1945. 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.
There were no tears shed for Irma Grese.
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