Irma Grese was born in 1923 to a working class German family. Her mother died when Grese was just 13 years old and her father, a farm worker, was left to raise their four children on his own.
Irma Grese was attracted to the Nazi movement as a young girl but her father forbade her from joining the Nazi organisation the League of German Girls. However, she eventually defied her father's wishes and became an SS guard, first at Ravensbruck concentration camp then later at Auschwitz and finally at Bergen-Belsen.
Grese told her sister that she a camp supervisor working in a sort of prisoner post office, but in fact she was a vicious guard who enjoyed inflicting pain on camp inmates, beating them with a whip and a walking stick. She also shot prisoners and helped to select victims for the gas chambers.
After the war Irma Grese was hanged. |
