Irma Grese
Oberaufseherin (Senior Supervisor) Ravensbrück Auschwitz Bergen-Belsen

Irma Grese (born October 7, 1923 at Wrechen near Pasewalk, Mecklenburg – died December 13, 1945 Hameln) was a supervisor at the Nazi concentration camps at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Dubbed the "Bitch of Belsen" by camp inmates for her cruel and perverse behaviour, she is one of the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. Irma Grese, This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... View of the barracks at Ravensbrück Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp located 90 km north of Berlin. ... Auschwitz, in English, commonly refers to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex built near the town of Oświęcim, by Nazi Germany during World War II. Rarely, it may refer to the Polish town of Oświęcim (called by the Germans Auschwitz) itself. ... Bergen-Belsen, sometimes referred to as just Belsen, was a German concentration camp in the Nazi era. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Pasewalk is a town of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Germany. ... Hamelin (German: Hameln) is a town in Lower Saxony, Germany. ... See also the related List of German concentration camps Concentration camp in Nazi Germany. ... View of the barracks at Ravensbrück Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp located 90 km north of Berlin. ... Auschwitz, in English, commonly refers to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex built near the town of Oświęcim, by Nazi Germany during World War II. Rarely, it may refer to the Polish town of Oświęcim (called by the Germans Auschwitz) itself. ... A mass grave inside Bergen-Belsen, 1945. ...

Background

Irma Grese was born to Alfred Grese, a dairy worker and a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from 1937, and Berta Grese. Irma Grese had four siblings. In 1936, her mother committed suicide. The National Socialist German Workers Party (German: , or NSDAP, or commonly, The Nazi Party), was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. ... 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Grese left school in 1938 at the age of 15, due to a combination of a poor scholastic aptitude, being bullied by classmates, and a fanatical preoccupation with the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, a Nazi female youth organization), of which her father disapproved. Among other casual jobs, she worked as an assistant nurse in the SS sanatorium for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse, after which she worked as dairy helper. Fanaticism is an emotion of being filled with excessive, uncritical zeal, particularly for an extreme religious or political cause, or with an obsessive enthusiasm for a pastime or hobby. ... After the Nazi Gleichschaltung in Germany in 1933, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (frequently used in its abbreviated form, BDM) (League of German Girls) was the all-German party organization for girls between 14 and 18 years of age, as the girls segment of the Hitler Youth. ... SS or ss or Ss may be: The Schutzstaffel, a Nazi paramilitary force Steamship (SS) (ship prefix) The United States Secret Service A submarine not powered by nuclear energy (SS) (United States Navy designator), see SSN A Soviet/Russian surface-to-surface missile, as listed by NATO reporting name Shortstop... Sanatório Heliantia A sanatorium refers to a medical facility for long-term illness, typically cholera or tuberculosis. ...

In 1942, at age 18, Grese volunteered for SS-Helferinnen (Female Helpers) training at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father did not approve of her new career, and ordered her to stay away from their house.^[1] SS or ss or Ss may be: The Schutzstaffel, a Nazi paramilitary force Steamship (SS) (ship prefix) The United States Secret Service A submarine not powered by nuclear energy (SS) (United States Navy designator), see SSN A Soviet/Russian surface-to-surface missile, as listed by NATO reporting name Shortstop... View of the barracks at Ravensbrück Ravensbrück was a notorious womens concentration camp during in World War II, located in northern Germany, 90 km north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel). ...

War crimes

Having completed the training in March 1943, Grese was transferred as a Aufseherin to Auschwitz, and by the end of that year she was Oberaufseherin (Senior Supervisor), the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners. Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,600 were women. ... Auschwitz, in English, commonly refers to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex built near the town of Oświęcim, by Nazi Germany during World War II. Rarely, it may refer to the Polish town of Oświęcim (called by the Germans Auschwitz) itself. ...

In January 1945, Grese briefly returned to Ravensbrück before ending her wartime career at Bergen-Belsen as an Arbeitsdienstführerin from March to April, being captured by the British April 17, 1945, together with other SS-personnel who did not flee. Grese was among the 44 people accused of war crimes at the Belsen Trial. She was tried over the first period of the trials (September 17 to November 17, 1945) and was represented by Major L. Cranfield. Bergen-Belsen, sometimes referred to as just Belsen, was a German concentration camp in the Nazi era. ... The Belsen Trial was one of several trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity that the Allied occupation forces conducted against former officials and functionaries of Nazi Germany after the end of World War II. The Belsen Trial (or, officially, Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others) began in...

The trials were conducted under British military law in Lüneburg, and the charges derived from the Geneva Convention of 1929 regarding the treatment of prisoners. The accusations against her centred on her ill-treatment and murder of those imprisoned at the camps, including setting dogs on inmates, shootings and sadistic beatings with a whip. Military law is a distinct legal system to which members of armed forces are subject. ... Lüneburg (English: Lunenburg) is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, about 50km southeast of Hamburg. ... The Geneva Conventions consist of treaties formulated in Geneva, Switzerland that set the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. ... Look up sadism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to her acts of sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. After a fifty-three day trial, Grese was sentenced to hang.

Grese was reported to have habitually worn heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and allegedly enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some women to death and whipped others using a plaited whip.^[2]

Execution

Grese and eleven others were convicted of crimes committed at both Auschwitz and Belsen and sentenced to death. Her subsequent appeal was rejected. The others included two other women, Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Capital punishment, also referred to as the death penalty, is the judicially ordered execution of a prisoner as a punishment for a serious crime, often called a capital offense or a capital crime. ... In law, an appeal is a process for making a formal challenge to an official decision. ... Juana Bormann was a prison guard at several Nazi death and concentration camps, and was executed as a war criminal at Hameln after a trial in 1945. ... Categories: 1919 births | 1945 deaths | Holocaust | Nazi leaders | Personnel of Nazi concentration camps | People stubs ...

On December 13, 1945, in Hameln Jail, Grese was led to the gallows and hanged by noted British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, assisted by Regimental Sergeant-Major O'Neill, as the youngest woman to die judicially under English law in the 20th century. Her last spoken word was "Schnell!" - ("Quickly!"). This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... The poster for the film about the life of Albert Pierrepoint Albert Pierrepoint (30 March 1905 – 10 July 1992) is the most famous member of a Yorkshire family who provided three of Britains Chief Executioners in the first half of the 20th century. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999...

External links

• The Belsen Trial, Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals, The United Nations War Crimes Commission, Volume II, London, HMSO, 1947, retrieved on 22 December 2006.
• Biography in GermanPDF (63.8 KiB)
• SS-Frauen am Galgen (German), max.mmvi.de, retrieved on 22 December, 2006.
• Irma Grese, Punishment U.K., retrieved on 22 December 22, 2006.
• Women guards in Bergen-Belsen, Scrapbookpages.com, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
• Irma Grese, Aushwitz.dk, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
• Auschwitz: Inside The Nazi State; Corruption: Episode 4, PBS.org, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
• Excerpts from The Belsen Trial - Part 5 of 5: Testimony of and concerning Irma Grese,The Nizkor Project, retrieved on December 22, 2006.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for desktop publishing use. ... A kibibyte (a contraction of kilo binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated KiB (never kiB). 1 kibibyte = 210 bytes = 1,024 bytes The kibibyte is closely related to the kilobyte, which can be used either as a synonym for kibibyte or to refer to... The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit public broadcasting television service with 354 member TV stations in the United States, with some member stations available by cable in Canada. ... The Nizkor (Hebrew: we will remember) Project is an ongoing Internet-based project run by Ken McVay which is dedicated to countering Holocaust revisionism. ...

References

1. ^ http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6142/irma.html
2. ^ http://www.vex.net/~nizkor/hweb/camps/bergen-belsen/belsen-trial-05.html