The Exhumation Of Irma Grese – Digging Up The Hyena Of Auschwitz

Throughout the Second World War, there were many evil women guards who served inside of concentration camps. Most of them are known for their immense brutality and evil, and they worked at sites such as Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. One of the most notorious women to have a fearsome reputation during the war was Irma Grese, a young 22-year-old woman who would be executed at the end of the war. She was the youngest woman to die under British law in the 20th century, and she was known as a “Beautiful Beast” or the “Hyena of Auschwitz.”

Grese was considered one of the worst guards, and she was someone who would not hesitate to encourage her dogs to attack inmates. She would also use her pistol to kill in cold blood. But after her execution, Grese’s remains were initially interred close to the place of her execution inside the prison yard, near to where she crashed through the trapdoor. However, less than a decade after her execution, one of the most evil Nazi guards was exhumed from her grave and was buried elsewhere. Join us today as we look at the exhumation of Irma Grese.

Irma Grese, during her teenage years, was desperate to join the League of German Girls, the Nazi youth group for young women and teenage girls. It was similar to the Hitler Youth, but Irma’s father banned her from joining this. However, she attended behind her father’s back along with her sister, and she became brainwashed by the Nazis’ politics. At the age of 14, she left school, and after she left home, she worked as a farmhand for six months before she worked in a shop in Lychen. She may have left home due to her father’s disapproval of her involvement with the Nazi groups, but it was clear she was beginning to become a woman who was obsessed with Hitler and the Nazis’ way of life.

She initially was a quiet girl who did not display violent tendencies, and she ran away from fights, but this would change in 1939. Irma Grese went to study nursing at the Hohenlychen Hospital, where many SS members went to convalesce. There, she trained under Karl Gebhardt, a horrific Nazi doctor. Gebhardt would be involved in a number of sadistic Nazi experiments inside of the concentration camps. Grese rubbed shoulders with many SS members and other virulent Nazis, but she was told that she would not make it as a nurse there. She was deemed not good enough and was told to look for work elsewhere, but Karl Gebhardt informed one of his friends at Ravensbrück concentration camp that Grese had potential.

Despite being told to come back six months later when she was 18, she became a female guard at Ravensbrück. At the time, she had to pass a number of exams, but she became one of around two-and-a-half thousand women who would serve inside of the concentration camps during the Second World War. She was hired to train as a guard, and she went through the training routine where she was told and forced into becoming a brute. It’s believed on her first day that she was actually apologizing to an inmate before she was told how to deal correctly with this sort of incident: whipping and beating the prisoner.

Grese continued to work at Ravensbrück, and she became known for her beatings which she administered on the women there. But when she was just 19, it was time for her to move elsewhere. Irma received instruction that she was to be transferred to Auschwitz, and because of this, she was sent to the largest concentration camp established in the Third Reich to help guard over the large female prison deportations that would arrive there. When she got to Auschwitz, she was assigned to the women’s camp of Birkenau, the main extermination site where the gas chambers killed thousands.

Her duties included commanding the gardening squad, working on telephone exchanges, and also being in control of the post room. But in May 1944, she became an Oberaufseherin, and she was commanding over 30,000 women prisoners in Birkenau’s BIIc camp. In this role, she became horrifically brutal, and she was known for wearing her heavy boots, carrying her pistol on her, and her whip with her at all times. Grese was known as a “Beautiful Beast” or the “Blonde Angel of Hell,” and she tormented the women constantly.

A former prisoner doctor of the camp said, “She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her face has an angelic clarity, and her blue eyes were the liveliest and most innocent eyes imaginable.”

Another prisoner said, “It defied belief that such a pretty girl could be so cruel. When she walked through the camp with a whip in her hand, she was surrounded by a cloud of choice perfume.”

She would attack the women using this whip and sometimes would beat them to death. She also had a role in medical experiments. One former doctor of Auschwitz said, “Irma Grese invariably arrived to watch the operation, kicking the victim if her screams interfered with her pleasure, and giving herself completely to the spasms which shook her entire body, making saliva run down the corner of her mouth.”

It’s clear she was also a sadist, and she was also a murderer who would shoot prisoners indiscriminately if they were not working hard enough. She also encouraged her dog to attack prisoners, and during one incident, she was on a bike with her dog next to her, and any prisoner who could not keep up with a 16-kilometer walk was mauled by the dog.

One witness said of her behavior: “We were loading the lorries before noon. We had an unexpected visitor: Aufseherin Irma with her two leashed dogs. Blonde with an angel face and snake eyes, the camp’s chief torturer. We were very careful not to attract her attention. We pushed and pushed; it seemed to take an eternity to roll the car over the hill. The next team was unable to coordinate its efforts. They were completely unnerved by our visitor. They hesitated and lost control of their wagon. It swayed, bowled down the hill, and capsized, scattering stone over the whole area. The prisoners were completely broken in spirit. Aufseherin Irma sent the two police dogs on them. The girls tried to escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily overtook them. One grabbed the Polish woman who slipped on a rock. The other fell upon a Russian girl. Under Irma’s orders, the kapo’s underlings beat and kicked the girls, still in touch by the dogs. The kapo wrote down the numbers of the delinquent team. The dogs were tearing at the girls’ bodies. Irma came closer to observe what they were doing. Her eyes were bloodshot. The sight of the blood seemed to intoxicate her; she panted, she was excited. Everybody could see that. We stood in a trance as at a gladiatorial combat.”

But one of her greatest crimes was that she was involved in prisoner selections, and she would personally send thousands of children, women, and men to their deaths inside of the gas chambers. She would patrol the railway yards, selecting prisoners to die. This would result in her own execution later. She indulged in all aspects of the camp’s life and even had an SS boyfriend, and allegedly had an affair with the evil Doctor Josef Mengele.

But as the Second World War was ongoing and going against the Germans, Irma Grese was transferred from Auschwitz along with a number of female prisoners. With the Red Army on the horizon, she was sent back to Ravensbrück for a short time before, in March 1945, she arrived in Bergen-Belsen. This was a concentration camp which was incredibly overcrowded and was breaking down due to the huge number of prisoners sent there. She was also reunited at Belsen with many of her former SS guards and friends, including the commandant, Josef Kramer.

Whilst at Belsen, Grese continued to demonstrate her evil, forcing inmates to stand for long periods of time, and she also forced prisoners to stand with rocks held above their heads. But she was still being brutal towards prisoners even as the Allies were close by, and she stayed at Belsen despite having the chance to flee. She remained to keep law and order.

But then the British arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Irma Grese was not immediately arrested, and she was forced to help bury ten thousand corpses which were lying all around the camp. She was then arrested and was held at a Wehrmacht tank training academy.

She said of her work, “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured.”

She was then brought to trial and was charged with ill-treatment, execution, murder, and barbarism at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Following a nine-week trial, she was sentenced to death by hanging and was one of only three female guards sentenced to death during the Belsen trials.

Irma Grese was held inside of Hamelin prison, which would be a place where many former SS guards would be executed inside of the execution chamber there. The night before her execution, she sang Nazi songs early into the morning, and on the 13th of December 1945, she was sent to be killed. The women sentenced to death were executed individually, and the men were executed in pairs. It was British executioner Albert Pierrepoint who conducted the execution of Grese.

It was said by Pierrepoint: “We climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were waiting. A German officer at the door leading to the corridor flung open the door. We filed past, our faces set, and into the execution chamber. The officers stood at attention. Brigadier Paton-Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised. He gave me the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber. I walked into the corridor.”

“Irma Grese,” I called.

The German guards quickly closed all grills on 12 of the inspection holes and opened one door. Irma Grese stepped out. The cell was far too small for me to go inside, and I had to pinion her in the corridor.

“Follow me,” I said in English.

And O’Neill repeated the order in German. At 9:34 AM, she walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing round it, then walked on the center of the trap where I had made the chalk mark. She stood on the mark firmly, and as I placed a white cap over her head, she said in her languid voice,

“Schnell.”

The drop crashed down, and the doctor followed me into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes, the body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial.

But this would not be the end of Irma Grese’s story. Her coffin was taken out of the execution chamber, and she was then quickly buried next to the other executed former SS guards hastily in the yard of Hamelin prison, just a stone’s throw away from the execution chamber. She was buried in the prison, which was under British control. However, in 1955, Hamelin prison was scheduled to be closed, and the prisoners were transferred to another prison nearby. However, the graves of the former Nazi guards were then disturbed and disinterred, and this included Irma Grese’s coffin.

The graves were mass graves from which Grese’s coffin was exhumed, and in 1950, the British had handed Hamelin back to the Germans. At the time, there was a significant amount of tension in Germany with right-wing elements in society, and some of those groups wanted to give the evil guards such as Irma Grese, Johanna Bormann, and Josef Kramer a decent burial. But in March 1954, the authorities began to exhume the bodies from the prison yard. They broke the ground and exhumed the remains, and then specialists identified them. They identified the body and remains of Irma Grese. Her bones were then placed inside of a separate coffin, and it was prepared for re-burial in an individual plot.

There were 91 bodies which were exhumed, and it was planned to be buried in consecrated ground in Hamelin’s Am Wehl Cemetery. The cemetery previously held the remains of former World War I soldiers, but it was then said that no memorials would be allowed on the graves of the exhumed former guards. Only wooden crosses would be allowed if the relatives paid for them.

One newspaper article of the exhumation said: “British occupation authorities refused to interfere with German authorities who moved the bodies from a mass grave to individual plots in a city cemetery after a campaign by Neo-Nazi elements in Hamelin, Lower Saxony. 30 of the 90 bodies of the executed Nazi war criminals have already been moved from a common mass grave near Hamelin and reinterred in the city’s cemetery. The remaining bodies will be moved later. Amongst those reburied are Josef Kramer, named the Beast of Belsen by inmates of the notorious death camp, and Irma Grese, who hounded women prisoners at Belsen. The World Jewish Congress issued a statement signed by its political secretary severely criticizing the re-burying of the Beast of Belsen, who starved, beat, and burned tens of thousands of Jewish and other camp inmates whilst he commanded the prison, as well as the other Nazi criminals.”

So what had happened is that Irma Grese’s body had been moved from Hamelin to a nearby graveyard, and it was interred along with many other evil executed Nazi war criminals. But as the years went on, many Neo-Nazi groups would visit the gravesite and hold rallies and meetings there, and the wooden crosses that were put up at the site were huge in their number. It was said that Grese’s remains were sickeningly a macabre tourist trap.

Then in the 1980s, the wooden crosses were removed, and the gravesite just became a grass field. It is marked next to a path, but recently there have been efforts to, rather than commemorate the perpetrators of the concentration camps, instead remember those victims. With this, Irma Grese’s resting place today is a grass field near the path, and no references specifically to her remain in that site.

Irma Grese was a notorious and disgusting female SS guard who was known for her evil treatment of prisoners inside many different camps. She was a woman who would be too eager to beat, brutalize, and kill with her bare hands, and following her execution, she was exhumed from the place she was initially buried. Much is known about her behavior at places such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but the story of her exhumation is one which is less known.