Irma Grese is known worldwide for her horrific acts while working as a warden in German death camps. For her character, she was nicknamed the Blonde Devil. Who was this young woman and how did she become the Angel of Death?
Family
Irma Grese was born on 1923-07-10 near Pasewalk (North-Eastern part of Germany) in a peasant family. Bertha and Alfred had five children. In 1936, they were all left without a mother who committed suicide. Since 1937, the father was enrolled in the NSDAP and was engaged in raising children on his own.
The start of the journey
A family tragedy did not allow the girl to get a proper education, and at the age of 15 Irma Grese, whose photos have survived to this day, was forced to leave school. At the same time, she began to actively show her qualities in the Union of German Girls.
In the next three years, Irma Grese, whose history amazes with its terrible and cruel pages, tried herself in different specializations. For some time she was a nurse's assistant in one of the SS sanatoriums. She never became a nurse. At 19 years olddespite the displeasure of her father, she became part of the auxiliary units of the SS.
Activities in the concentration camp
Irma Grese began her work in the auxiliary troops from the Ravensbrück camp. A year later, she was assigned to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In less than six months, she received the position of senior warden. This made her second in command among the camp staff. Only the commandant was more important than her.
An interesting fact is the information that a 20-year-old girl was not going to be a warden all her life. She had a dream - to become a movie actress after the war.
In the spring of 1945, a young woman was, at her own request, redirected to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where Josef Kramer was transferred as commandant. A month later, she was captured by the British.
The cruelty of the young matron
During the investigation into the case of the Beautiful Beast, as she was sometimes called, many of the surviving prisoners testified with their testimonies about the particular brutality with which Irma Grese worked in the camps.
During the torture, she used emotional and physical methods of humiliation. She personally beat imprisoned women to death, selected people to be killed in gas chambers, and enjoyed the shooting of prisoners, which was carried out at random.
Among her favorite pastimes was setting her dogs on prisoners. At the same time, she deliberately starved her own pets for greater aggressiveness.
To many prisonersshe is remembered as a blonde in heavy boots with a pistol and a braided whip in her hands.
Besides this, the Western press wrote a lot about all kinds of sexual hobbies of the matron. She was credited with a relationship with Josef Kramer, Josef Mengele, as well as sexual pleasures with the SS guards. There is no confirmation of this.
Belsen process
Irma Grese, whose torture was particularly cruel, after being taken prisoner, was brought to trial. The trial of the crimes of the camp workers was called Belzensky. It was initiated by the British military tribunal, which examined the cases of 45 people who worked in the protection of the camp liberated by the British. Half of them were women. The court worked from September to November 1945 in the city of Lüneburg.
Initially there should have been more defendants, but not all survived to see the trial:
- seventeen people died of typhus, which they contracted in Bergen-Belsen;
- three shot while trying to escape;
- one person personally committed suicide.
Interest in this court was incredible. This was due to the fact that most of the prisoners had previously worked in Auschwitz. At the trial, the world first learned about such crimes against humanity as selective breeding, crematoria, and gas chambers. Although there were no gas chambers in the camp itself, about 50,000 people died in it.
Depending on the severity of the crimes, the verdicts of the judges were different. So, 11 people were sentenced to deathby hanging, 20 received from ten to fifteen years in prison, the rest were acquitted. Among those released during the trial were minor camp employees: an electrician, cooks, a storekeeper and other representatives of the staff.
The most notorious cases of the Belsen process:
- Joseph Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen camp, whom the prisoners called the Beast. During his eleven-year career, he worked in many concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The court accused him of killing 80 prisoners, whose bodies were later used by Dr. August Hirz for his research.
- Fritz Klein, a camp doctor who joined the SS from the Romanian army and conducted experiments on camp prisoners. It was also his duty in the camp to select Jews and Gypsies for the gas chambers.
- Elisabeth Volkenrath - nurses and assistants to Dr. Klein.
Execution
The warden Irma Grese was sentenced to death by hanging, as her guilt was proven. The verdict was put into effect on 1945-13-12 in the Hameln prison. According to eyewitnesses, on the night before the hanging, she and her camp colleague, Elisabeth Volkenrath, sang songs and laughed.
The English executioner Albert Pierpoint performed the procedure. When he threw a noose around the neck of the accused woman, she said to him with a calm face: "Faster." She was 22 at the time of her death. Thus ended the life of a beautiful and cruel warden who, despite her young age, destroyed thousands of lives.
