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One of the most brutal Auschwitz guards tortured women and sent them to the gas chamber, choosing most often the beautiful ones. Those who could compete with her. A real Aryan, Irma Grese became a nightmare for the captives who survived the war.
Irma was one of five children in the family of Bertha and Alfred Grese. The family was dysfunctional, the parents did not get along, and this is putting it mildly. When Irma was thirteen, her mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid - she found out that her husband was cheating on her. Two years later, the future warden dropped out of school, became imbued with Nazi ideology and became a fierce activist of the Hitler Youth.
For some time, young Grese was looking for her calling - she worked briefly as a nurse's assistant in the SS sanatorium Hohenlichen, but this place was too boring for the active Irma. And at the age of 18, Grese joined the women's auxiliary unit of the SS and moved to a women's training base near Ravensbrück, a women's concentration camp. After preparation, Grese remained a volunteer in the camp and very soon received the post of warden, and a little later she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
She beat prisoners until their faces turned into a bloody mess, kicked them half to death with her pointed boots, poisoned women with hungry dogs, and forced prisoners to hold heavy stones over their heads until their hands pierced with pain.
Instead of a uniform, Grese wore a tight blue jacket, and even her whip was pearl inlaid.
Her refined appearance was also a kind of torture for the dirty, tattered prisoners of the concentration camp. The prisoner Olga Lengel, whose children died in the gas chambers, wrote in her memoir Five Chimneys that it was Grese who was engaged in the selection of women for the gas chambers (they never said that - they preferred the euphemism “special treatment”) and for Dr. Mengele’s medical experiments.
Lengel mentioned that Irma had lovers among the SS, including Josef Mengele.
According to Gisella Pearl, a Jewish doctor at Auschwitz, Irma experienced sexual arousal at the sight of women suffering.
The most surprising thing at the same time was that there were girls whom, for some mysterious reason, Irma sympathized with. These were members of the camp orchestra, who, among other things, entertained the SS with their music. In the very existence of such an orchestra there was something macabre, some kind of black irony.
She found Yvette a place in the kitchen and gave her sister an extra ration to help her get back on her feet.
In 1945, Irma asked to be transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the British captured her a month later.
At the Belzen trial, Irma, along with other camp workers, was sentenced to hanging.
The former warden did not doubt for a second that she was right, that she had made the right choice. At night, on the eve of the execution, she loudly sang Nazi songs, and went to the gallows without flinching. When a rope was thrown around her neck, she sharply commanded: "Scnheller!" ("Faster!") Grese died at 22.
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