World War II brought out the worst in many people, and not all of those monsters were men.
In the shadow of Auschwitz’s gas chambers, 19-year-old Irma Grese gained a terrifying kind of power.
Prisoners feared her for her brutal beatings, her fierce dog, and her role in sending thousands to the gas chambers.
Her name became one spoken in fear.
But in the end, justice caught up with her.
On December 13, 1945, the British executed her for war crimes.
Irma Grese was born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, a small village in northeastern Germany.
She grew up in the countryside, surrounded by farmland and quiet roads.
Life in rural Germany during the 1920s and 30s was tough, especially after World War I.
Many families were poor, and opportunities were limited, especially for girls like Irma.
Her father worked long hours as a dairy worker, trying to support his five children.
Irma’s childhood took a dark turn when she was just 13 years old.
Her mother, Berta Grese, took her own life by drinking hydrochloric acid after discovering that her husband had been unfaithful.
This left a deep scar on the family.
For a young girl like Irma, losing her mother in such a tragic way was not only heartbreaking but also confusing and traumatizing.
After that, the family life became unstable.
Her father, Alfred Grese, couldn’t handle everything on his own.
He often argued with Irma and didn’t offer much comfort or warmth.
It’s said he was strict and sometimes cold.
Irma was soon left to figure things out mostly on her own.
She didn’t do well in school.
Not because she wasn’t smart, but because she simply wasn’t interested, and perhaps she was dealing with too much at home.
At 14 years old, she dropped out of school completely.
In Germany at the time, education was not always a path people could follow, especially if you were poor or female.
Irma tried to find work instead.
She took small jobs, first helping on a farm, then later working briefly at a hospital in Hohenluchen, a place that also had a connection to the SS medical community.
But she didn’t stay there long.
She didn’t have the qualifications to become a nurse, and her lack of education made it hard to move forward.
Despite the troubled home life, she was drawn to authority and structure.
Irma started attending meetings of the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Hitler Youth.
This group taught girls loyalty to Adolf Hitler, physical fitness, and preparation for life as obedient wives and mothers.
But for Irma, it seemed to be more than just tradition, it gave her a sense of power, order, and belonging that she didn’t have at home.
By 1942, World War II was at its height.
Germany was fighting on many fronts, and the Nazi regime was growing more brutal by the day.
Irma was only 18 years old when she decided to take a path that would forever change her life and the lives of countless others.
She volunteered to become a camp guard, something few women did at the time.
She joined the SS Women’s Auxiliary Service.
This group was created to support the male SS officers by placing women in key roles within the concentration camp system.
These women were trained not just in camp procedures but also in the strict ideology of the Nazi regime.
They were expected to follow orders without question and show no sympathy toward the prisoners.
Irma began her training at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany.
It was located about 50 miles north of Berlin.
Ravensbrück wasn’t just a camp, it was a training ground for female guards.
Women who trained here were taught how to supervise large groups of prisoners, how to control them using harsh discipline, and how to maintain loyalty to the SS above all else.
Many of the female guards who would later become infamous for their cruelty also passed through Ravensbrück.
Irma’s training didn’t take long.
By March 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps.
She was just 19 years old.
Despite her young age and lack of experience, Irma quickly gained attention.
She didn’t act like someone new to the job.
Instead, she adapted quickly to the brutal environment and even seemed to enjoy the power she had over the prisoners.
The women at Auschwitz soon gave her a chilling nickname of “The Hyena of Auschwitz.
” She was known for her smirking smile while carrying out violent acts, and for laughing at prisoners who cried or begged for mercy.
This dark reputation spread quickly among the thousands of inmates who feared encountering her.
At Auschwitz, Irma worked under high-ranking SS officers like Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” known for his horrifying medical experiments, and Josef Kramer, who would later become the commandant of Bergen-Belsen.
Irma’s main duty was to oversee female prisoners, but she was far more involved than just watching over them.
Many survivors later testified that Irma regularly beat prisoners, sometimes without any clear reason.
She carried a rubber truncheon or a whip, and she used them often.
She also had a German Shepherd dog trained to attack prisoners on command.
Witnesses said she would let the dog loose on people who were too weak to work or who didn’t follow orders fast enough.
She even used the dog to scare pregnant women and children.
What was even more disturbing was Irma’s involvement in the selections.
These were the moments when SS officers would choose who would live and who would be sent to the gas chambers.
Even though she wasn’t a doctor or senior official, Irma still took part in these selections.
Survivors said she stood at the platforms where trains arrived, helping to choose who would be sent to their deaths.
It’s estimated that thousands of women and children died in gas chambers after being selected by Irma and others.
There were also reports of psychological torment.
Irma often taunted prisoners, played mind games with them, and sometimes offered false hope just to crush it later.
Some survivors remembered her forcing women to stand in painful positions for hours or making them strip naked in the freezing cold as a form of punishment.
Others said she chose specific women to torment repeatedly, enjoying the power she had over their suffering.
By the time she was 21, Irma had become one of the most hated and feared figures at Auschwitz.
Her youth, her cold behavior, and her deep involvement in the system of torture made her stand out even among other guards.
By January 1945, World War II was entering its final stage.
The Soviet Red Army was advancing rapidly from the east and getting closer to Auschwitz.
As the Soviets pushed forward, the Nazis began evacuating the camp to cover up what had been happening there.
They didn’t want the Allies to see the full scale of the mass murders, and they didn’t want prisoners to be freed.
Irma was among the SS staff selected to be moved during this chaotic retreat.
Along with other guards and prisoners, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp located in northern Germany, near the town of Celle.
The move happened around mid-January 1945, and it was part of a broader relocation of SS personnel from eastern camps to camps further west.
Bergen-Belsen had originally been set up as a prisoner-of-war camp, but by late 1944, it had been turned into a concentration camp to hold Jews and other groups the Nazis wanted to keep imprisoned as the war neared its end.
By the time Irma arrived in early 1945,
the situation at Bergen-Belsen was completely out of control.
The camp was overcrowded, with tens of thousands of prisoners crammed into filthy barracks with little food, no sanitation, and almost no medical help.
Many of the people who arrived there, some from Auschwitz and others from camps all over Europe, were already weak, sick, and starving.
The camp simply couldn’t handle that many people.
The Nazis had stopped caring about order, and disease was spreading rapidly.
Typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis were killing people in massive numbers.
In just a few months, over 35,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen from illness, starvation, and neglect.
Irma Grese stepped into this chaos as a supervising SS guard, still wearing her uniform and carrying out orders like before.
She was now under the command of Josef Kramer, the same SS officer she had worked with at Auschwitz.
He had been appointed commandant of Bergen-Belsen in December 1944, just before Grese arrived.
Like at Auschwitz, the two of them worked together closely.
Even though the camp was falling apart, Irma didn’t change her behavior.
Witnesses later testified that she continued beating prisoners, using her dog to intimidate them, and showing no sympathy for the suffering around her.
She was regularly seen shouting at inmates, ordering brutal punishments, and even helping organize roll calls that left people standing outside for hours in freezing temperatures.
Some survivors remembered Irma still looking polished and confident, walking through the camp with her riding crop or whip, while people around her were literally dying in piles.
She reportedly chose certain prisoners for abuse and seemed unaffected by the misery that filled the camp.
Conditions at Bergen-Belsen grew worse every day.
There was almost no clean water, and no functioning toilets, and dead bodies were left lying in the open because there weren’t enough people or resources to bury them.
Even SS personnel started to panic as the camp became impossible to manage.
Still, Irma continued doing her job, enforcing rules, and maintaining the brutal discipline she had learned back in Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.
By April 1945, the war in Europe was coming to an end.
The Nazi regime was falling apart, and Allied forces were racing through Germany.
On April 15, 1945, soldiers from the British 11th Armoured Division reached the gates of Bergen-Belsen.
They had no idea what they were about to walk into.
The camp was not protected or defended.
The SS guards were still there, but the place was in total collapse.
British troops were not expecting to find a concentration camp.
But what they saw inside would stay with them forever.
Lying all around the camp were over 13,000 dead bodies, left unburied.
Some had been there for days or even weeks.
Many were naked, thin as skeletons, and clearly died from disease or starvation.
Some bodies were piled on top of each other.
The smell was unbearable.
Even worse, there were still about 60,000 people alive inside the camp.
Most were so weak they couldn’t stand.
Many had open sores, infected wounds, or were shaking from hunger.
Typhus had spread across the camp, and thousands were close to death.
British forces were shocked.
Many had seen battle before, but this was something different.
The camp was dirty, silent, and full of suffering.
Medical officers, including Brigadier Glyn Hughes, quickly took charge of trying to help the survivors.
But they were overwhelmed.
Thousands died even after the camp was liberated, simply because their bodies were already too damaged to survive.
Despite the British bringing in food, water, and medical help, about 14,000 more people died in the weeks after liberation.
The soldiers acted quickly.
They knew the SS guards had to be held responsible.
Within hours of taking the camp, the British rounded up all SS personnel still present.
This included Josef Kramer and Irma Grese.
Irma did not resist arrest.
She didn’t try to escape or hide.
In fact, reports said she stood calmly in her SS uniform and surrendered without saying much.
She looked confident and composed, which surprised many soldiers.
Given the horror around her, her calmness was disturbing.
It was as if she didn’t feel any guilt or fear.
Survivors of the camp immediately recognized her.
Her name was already known from reports given by freed prisoners.
The British soldiers separated the SS guards from the general prisoner population for safety and started questioning them.
Irma was placed under armed guard and taken to a detention facility.
Her belongings were taken, and her statements were recorded.
From this point on, she was no longer a guard, no longer free, and no longer feared.
But the story was far from over.
The British knew that what had happened at Bergen-Belsen needed to be exposed.
The world had to know what had gone on inside Nazi concentration camps.
So they began collecting evidence, photographs, testimonies, official documents, and personal reports from survivors.
They filmed the camp as they found it.
These images were later shown during trials and in newspapers around the world.
People were horrified.
No one could believe such things had taken place in the heart of Europe.
In the weeks that followed, the British began preparing for a major war crimes trial.
It would be one of the first of its kind, and it would include Irma as one of the main defendants.
The trial started on September 17, 1945, just five months after the British had entered Bergen-Belsen.
It took place in the city of Lüneburg, in northern Germany, inside a British military courtroom.
This trial was one of the very first Nazi war crimes trials held after World War II.
It came before the famous Nuremberg Trials and was officially known as the Belsen Trial.
A total of 45 people were on trial.
This group included SS guards, camp doctors, and functionaries from both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Among them were Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Dr.
Fritz Klein.
Irma Grese was the youngest defendant, and the most well-known woman in the group.
The trial lasted two full months, ending on November 17, 1945.
It was held publicly, with journalists, observers, and members of the military watching closely.
For the first time, survivors were given a platform to speak.
Their testimonies were detailed and painful.
They told the court what life in the camps had been like and what Irma had done to them.
One of the survivors, a Hungarian woman named Elizabeth Volkenrath, not to be confused with the SS guard of the same name, said she saw Grese ordering brutal punishments and laughing when prisoners cried in pain.
These testimonies were backed by others from Poland, France, and the Netherlands, creating a consistent picture of Irma as a cruel, powerful figure inside the camps.
Grese didn’t deny the charges.
She admitted she had worked at the camps and confirmed she was assigned to select prisoners during roll calls.
But she tried to downplay her role.
She said she was just following orders and claimed that she was not responsible for the killings.
However, her calm behavior in court made many people uncomfortable.
She did not cry.
She didn’t even look guilty.
In fact, during some parts of the trial, she was seen smiling or looking bored, even as witnesses described violent acts linked to her.
This lack of emotion shocked observers.
Some British officers later said that watching her sit in the courtroom was more disturbing than hearing the testimonies.
The judges of the British military court listened to the evidence for weeks.
The case was backed by over 20 survivor statements, official documents, and even camp records.
On November 17, 1945, Irma Grese was officially found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The court didn’t hesitate.
They sentenced her to death by hanging.
She was only 22 years old at the time.
Out of the 45 people on trial, 11 were sentenced to death, and Grese was one of them.
Most of the others received long prison terms.
A few were acquitted due to lack of evidence, but the majority were found guilty.
Some of the convicted SS guards tried to appeal their sentences.
They asked for clemency or lighter punishment.
But Grese did not.
She never filed an appeal.
She accepted the sentence without protest.
The execution took place on December 13, 1945, at Hamelin Prison, a former Nazi prison taken over by the British after the war.
The man in charge was Albert Pierrepoint, one of Britain’s most experienced executioners.
That day, he was assigned to hang 11 Nazi war criminals, one after the other.
The hangings began early in the morning.
Pierrepoint worked in silence and with great speed.
Irma Grese was the third person to be executed that day, and the only woman.
She walked to the gallows wearing a simple white blouse, gray jacket, and a skirt.
Her hands were tied behind her back, and a black hood was placed over her head.
She reportedly showed no signs of fear.
In fact, Albert Pierrepoint later wrote in his memoir that Irma was one of the calmest people he had ever executed.
She walked steadily, stood where she was told, and did not cry or resist.
The entire process took only a few minutes.
Her body, like the others, was buried in an unmarked grave near the prison.
The location was kept secret for years to avoid creating a place where sympathizers could gather.
After her death, people had very different opinions about her.
Some thought she got what she deserved.
Others couldn’t believe someone so young could be capable of such cruelty.
Her story raised uncomfortable questions, about how ordinary people can become part of terrible systems, and how young someone can be and still be responsible for serious crimes.
In post-war Germany, some people tried to deny or minimize what had happened in the camps.
But trials like hers made the facts impossible to ignore.
The evidence was too strong.
And her case forced people to face the role that women played in Nazi crimes, not just men.
