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Irma
Grese S.S. concentration camp supervisor (Aufseherin)
at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.
Completed her elementary school at age 15 in 1938.
Varied employment in retail, farming, and hospital until sent to
Ravensbrück in July, 1942. In March, 1943, transferred to Auschwitz.
In January, 1945, returned to Ravensbrück before being
transferred to Bergen-Belsen in March. In Auschwitz Grese undertook a range of duties,
including that of telephone operator, commander of a gardening detail,
and mail censor, prior to being appointed as an Oberaufseherin
(Senior SS-Supervisor) in the autumn of 1943 in C Lager, part of
Birkenau then occupied by Polish Jewish women, and later by Hungarians.
This was the second highest rank that SS female concentration
camp pesonnel could attain. The
position allowed her “virtual control of 30,000 women in Birkenau’s C
Lager, and…the power to exterminate literally thousands of human
beings on a whim. [According
to a witness at her subsequent trial, she sent] thousands and thousands
of people, ill and in quite good health, to the gas chambers.” (Brown) The testimony of many survivors, and that given at
her subsequent trial, provides extensive details of murders, tortures,
cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Grese during her years at
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In
addition to her involvement in the selections for the gas chambers, she
is reputed to have been responsible for up to thirty murders a day, for
continual beatings and whipping of concentration camp inmates, for
directing her dog to savage others, and for using inmates to satisfy
bisexual sadistic inclinations. These practices were continued at Bergen-Belsen.
Bergen-Belsen was the first large concentration camp to be
liberated by the British, on April 15, 1945.
The conditions found there “were to astonish and to horrify the
world a day or so later. Briefly,
these were that in a camp of the approximate dimensions of 1500 by 350
metres were confined about 40,000 men and women in the most extreme
state of starvation and emaciation, many of them suffering from typhus;
there were, in addition, 13,000 unburied corpses, and that for the
living there was little food, less sleeping and living accommodation,
and no medical assistance.” (Phillips) The Kommandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef
Kramer, along with forty-four others, was indicted before a
British Military Court, under Royal Warrant of 14th June,
1945. After Kramer, Grese
was the most notorious defendant in the “Belsen
Trial,” held between 17th September and 17th
November, 1945. Grese was
convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
Along with the two other women sentenced to death
by the tribunal (Volkenrath and Bormann), she was executed on the
Morning of 13th December, 1945. Sources: |