Final Reckoning of Auschwitz’s Most Feared Nazi Guard: Irma Grese — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00The 15th of April, 1945, southwest of Bergen,  Nazi Germany. The British 11th Armored Division
2. 0:08liberates Bergen-Belsen – one of the worst Nazi  concentration camps which would epitomize the
3. 0:14true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime  and its death camps. The British forces find
4. 0:2113,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000  prisoners who are sick and starved. Thousands of
5. 0:28other inmates will die of various diseases  such as typhus and tuberculosis during the
6. 0:33months following the camp’s liberation. The  British forces capture male and female Nazi
7. 0:38personnel responsible for these horrors and force  them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves.
8. 0:44One of them, who would become one  of the most infamous perpetrators
9. 0:48of the criminal Nazi Regime, is Irma Grese.
10. 0:52Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October  1923 in Wrechen then part of the Weimar
11. 0:58Republic which was the government  of Germany from 1918 to 1933. Irma
12. 1:03was the third of five children, and  both her parents were dairy workers.
13. 1:07Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into  power in January 1933. The Nazis were
14. 1:13skilled propagandists who used sophisticated  advertising techniques and the most current
15. 1:18technology of the time to spread their messages. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls
16. 1:23were developed as Nazi Party youth groups to  introduce children and juveniles to Nazi ideology
17. 1:28and policy. These youth groups also prepared  Germany’s young people for war. Because Irma’s
18. 1:35father was not a Nazi sympathizer and despised  everything that was associated with the Nazis,
19. 1:39he never allowed his children to join the Nazi  youth organizations even though they wanted to.
20. 1:44However, it was impossible to avoid Nazi  indoctrination as schools too played an
21. 1:49important role in spreading Nazi ideas to the  German youth. From their first days at school,
22. 1:54German children such as Irma Grese were imbued  with the cult of Adolf Hitler and his portrait
23. 2:00was a standard fixture in all classrooms. While  censors removed some books from the classroom,
24. 2:05German educators introduced new textbooks  that taught students love for Hitler,
25. 2:10obedience to state authority,  militarism, racism, and antisemitism.
26. 2:15In 1936, when Irma was 13 years old, her  mother committed suicide following the
27. 2:21discovery of her husband’s affair  with a local pub owner's daughter.
28. 2:24She was then raised only by her father Alfred  Grese, a devout Christian, who was very stern
29. 2:30and strict with his children and would often  used physical violence to discipline them.
30. 2:34In school, Irma Grese  performed poorly in academics.
31. 2:38According to Irma's sister Helene, Irma was  bullied badly at school and dropped out when
32. 2:43she was only 14. She then stayed for six months  on a farm working on agricultural job and then
33. 2:49moved to Luchen where she worked in  a retail shop for 6 months as well.
34. 2:53In 1939, at the age of 15 Grese went to the  Hohenlychen Sanatorium where she worked as an
35. 2:59assistant nurse for about 2 years and trainer  under sanatorium’s medical Superintendent Karl
36. 3:04Gebhardt, a Nazi doctor who would later perform  medical experiments on Ravensbrück concentration
37. 3:09camp inmates during the Second World War. Grese wanted to become a full-fledged nurse
38. 3:14at Hohenlychen Sanatorium but because she did not  do well enough academically, in 1941 at the age
39. 3:19of 17, she was instead sent to a dairy farm in  Fürstenberg where she operated a butter machine.
40. 3:25Her criminal career in concentration camps began
41. 3:28in July 1942 when she arrived in  Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
42. 3:33Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only  major women's camp established by the Nazis.
43. 3:39In total, some 132,000 women from all over  Europe passed through the camp, including Poles,
44. 3:46Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of  that number, over 92,000 women perished.
45. 3:53Ravensbrück camp was staffed both by SS men,  who served as guards and administrators,
46. 3:58and by 150 women, who served as supervisors.  These female supervisors were either SS
47. 4:04volunteers or women who had taken the job  for the good pay and working conditions.
48. 4:09Ravensbrück also housed a training camp  for female SS guards who were taught by
49. 4:14Dorothea Binz - the sadistically cruel  German Nazi officer and supervisor - who
50. 4:19instructed her trainees on how to handle the  prisoners that they were going to supervise.
51. 4:23These prisoners would have to work until  they died and the task of their supervisors,
52. 4:28such as Irma Grese, was to get a maximum  amount of work out of them whilst they
53. 4:32were still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became  a training center or “a school of violence “ for
54. 4:38about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve  either there or at other concentration camps.
55. 4:44Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical  doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück
56. 4:50to unethical medical experiments. The  main coordinator of these experiments
57. 4:54was Karl Gebhardt and his assistants became  doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer.
58. 4:59They often used a hammer to break legs of  female prisoners, then infected open wounds
59. 5:05with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing  with and without various chemical substances such
60. 5:10as sulfanilamide, which was an early antibiotic,  to prevent infections. Believing it could help
61. 5:15in treating amputee soldiers, they also tested  various methods of setting and transplanting
62. 5:20bones. Such experiments included amputations  and were often performed without any anesthesia.
63. 5:25The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly  Polish, for these experiments. Many of the
64. 5:31women died as a result. Those who survived often  suffered permanent physical damage. SS doctors
65. 5:38also carried out sterilization experiments on  women and children, many of them Roma people,
66. 5:43in an attempt to develop an efficient  method of sterilization. They were also
67. 5:48involved in forced abortions of women  who were already seven or eight months
68. 5:51pregnant. In addition to these forced  abortions, they were also known for
69. 5:55the beating of pregnant women to cause  miscarriages and the killing of newborns.
70. 5:59Irma Grese knew Karl Gebhardt from  Hohenlychen Senatorium and it is believed
71. 6:04that at Ravensbrück Grese, then 18 years old, also
72. 6:08served as an assistant nurse during the  experiments and was exposed to atrocities
73. 6:12which might have had a damaging impact on her  personality turning her into a violent sadist.
74. 6:17When she came home in 1943 and told  her family that she was supervising
75. 6:21the prisoners working inside  the compound at Ravensbrück,
76. 6:24her father gave her a thrashing with a belt or  a whip and forbade her from coming home again.
77. 6:29In March, 1943 Irma Grese was  deployed in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
78. 6:34which was located in German occupied Poland.
79. 6:36Birkenau was the largest of the more than  40 camps and sub-camps that made up the
80. 6:41Auschwitz complex. It was divided into  ten sections separated by electrified
81. 6:45barbed-wire fences. It was patrolled by SS  guards, including—after 1942—SS dog handlers.
82. 6:53During its three years of operation, it had a  range of functions. When construction began in
83. 6:58October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for  125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a
84. 7:06branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at  the same time as a center for the extermination
85. 7:11of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944,  it also became a place where prisoners were
86. 7:17concentrated before being transferred to labor in  German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
87. 7:22According to Irma’s sister Helene, when Irma  was a little girl, she was frightened to
88. 7:27stand up for herself, and would run away  to avoid a fight. At Auschwitz however,
89. 7:32Grese found herself for the first time in  a position to strike people when they could
90. 7:36not strike her back. And she enjoyed it. Grese would become one of the most hated
91. 7:41and feared guards in the camp and she owed her  infamous nicknames "the Hyena of Auschwitz" and
92. 7:47"the Beautiful Beast" to her cruelty and  brutality. Grese was also reputed to be
93. 7:52a sexual deviant, taking lovers from the male  and female populace of Birkenau. She was also
94. 7:57alleged to have had affairs with the infamous  doctor Josef Mengele, as well as Josef Kramer,
95. 8:01the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and  later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
96. 8:05Doctor Gisella Perl, former Auschwitz  prisoner, said about Irma: “She was one
97. 8:11of the most beautiful women I have ever  seen. Her body was perfect in every line,
98. 8:15her face clear and angelic,  and her blue eyes the gayest,
99. 8:18the most innocent eyes one can imagine.  And yet Irma Grese was the most depraved,
100. 8:23cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across.” In her memoir Five Chimneys, Auschwitz survivor
101. 8:31Olga Lengyel writes that Grese had affairs  not only with doctor Mengele but with many
102. 8:35other Nazis as well. When it came time to select  women for the gas chamber, Lengyel noted that Irma
103. 8:41Grese would purposely pick out the beautiful  female prisoners due to jealousy and spite.
104. 8:45However, there were female prisoners  that Irma Grese was fond of.
105. 8:50Such was a case of Nina Kaleska, then 16 years  old, whom Grese told her that she looked like
106. 8:55her sister Helene. Kaleska was used by Irma  as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma
107. 9:00held lesbian orgies in barracks and watched  out so that nobody would interrupt them.
108. 9:05Grese had numerous affairs with female inmates  and when she grew bored of them, she would select
109. 9:09them for gas chamber to be killed. She also beat her sexual subjects.
110. 9:14When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s  advances toward him, he had to watch Irma
111. 9:19dragging his naked girlfriend around the camp  by the hair and then whipping her. After Grese
112. 9:24tortured the woman he loved, she had the man  shot and the woman sent to the camp brothel.
113. 9:28When Mengele discovered that she was  having affairs with Jewish inmates,
114. 9:31who were deemed racially inferior,  he ended his relationship with her.
115. 9:36At Auschwitz, Grese fell in  love with SS man Franz Wolfgang
116. 9:40Hatzinger who was the chief engineer of  the Auschwitz I construction department.
117. 9:44Despite this relationship, Grese had so many  lovers that at one point, she developed sexually
118. 9:49transmitted diseases and according to Olga  Lengyel, she had numerous abortions. Doctor
119. 9:54Gisella Perl performed one of these abortions and  Irma's only concern was the "pain" she would feel.
120. 9:59Upon her arrival at Auschwitz, Grese  held various positions within the camp.
121. 10:04At first Grese performed telephone duties,  then she was transferred as a sort of light
122. 10:10punishment to be in charge of the kommando which  carried stones from the outside into the camp.
123. 10:15She received this punishment  because she did not wear her caps.
124. 10:19She was also in charge of the commando making  the roads inside the camp and the gardening work.
125. 10:23In May 1944 the extermination of  Hungarian Jews was to take place.
126. 10:28During 8 weeks from the 15th of May to July  9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials,
127. 10:35under the guidance of German SS  officials, deported around 424,000
128. 10:40Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau,  where, upon arrival and after selection,
129. 10:44SS functionaries killed the  majority of them in gas chambers.
130. 10:48The same month, at the age of 20 Grese would  become the senior guard of Birkenau’s Lager
131. 10:54or Camp “ C “ supervising 6 or 7 female guards  who changed every week. Camp C consisted of 28
132. 11:01blocks where prisoners were accommodated as  well as other blocks such as a food block,
133. 11:05two stores with underwear and clothing, two or  three blocks for latrines and two wash-houses.
134. 11:10Normally the accommodation would only have been  suitable for 100 or a maximum of 300 prisoners,
135. 11:16but the camp was overcrowded, that Grese  had 1000 prisoners in each block. In some
136. 11:22of the blocks there were bunks large enough  for five people to sleep in, but in most of
137. 11:26the blocks there were neither beds nor bunks. In Grese’s Lager C there were approximately
138. 11:3130,000 prisoners, all of whom were Hungarians,  whilst the Blockältesten were Czechoslovaks.
139. 11:37The Blockältester, block or barracks leader,  was an inmate who had to ensure that rules
140. 11:42were followed in the individual barracks  and was also responsible for the prisoners
141. 11:46in the barracks. Because the camp was  overcrowded sanitary conditions were
142. 11:51horrible. The latrines ceased to function and  Grese would later describe how “wherever you
143. 11:56went it was just as if the prisoners thought  that any place was good enough for a latrine”.
144. 12:00In the camp, she was infamous for carrying  her woven leather whip which was covered
145. 12:05with cellophane so that human blood could be  easily washed from it. She would stand at the
146. 12:09gate when the working parties were going out and  coming in and regularly beat inmates there with
147. 12:14her whip only because she enjoyed it. Later she would proudly say “It was
148. 12:19a very light whip, but if I hit  somebody with it, it would hurt”.
149. 12:23Irma Grese beat and ill-treated prisoners  to such an extent that the camp’s Commandant
150. 12:27Josef Kramer told her to stop using it.  However, she went on using her whip anyway.
151. 12:33The most frequent reasons to whip the prisoners  were that they stole food because they were
152. 12:37hungry, or they showed up late for the roll  calls. During the roll calls which often took
153. 12:42from 3 AM until 9 AM, the prisoners had to stand  still. When they moved, they were either beaten or
154. 12:49had to kneel down for hours. Grese’s explanation  for whipping was that they were running to and
155. 12:54from and she could not count them properly. Her other specialty in making these roll
156. 12:59calls as difficult as possible was to  order the prisoners to stand holding a
157. 13:02large stone above their heads in each hand  and if they faltered, she would beat them.
158. 13:06On one occasion the prisoners cut up their  blankets and made shoes or jackets of them.
159. 13:12Grese gave strict orders to return  all sort of things produced out of
160. 13:16these blankets at once. But because nothing  was returned, she ordered the search of the
161. 13:20blocks and prisoners who had these things  in their possession, were brutally whipped.
162. 13:24In addition to her whip, Irma Grese also used  to beat the prisoners with her walking stick.
163. 13:29Grese’s favorite habit was to beat women  until they were bleeding and fell to the
164. 13:33ground and then kick them as hard as she  could with her heavy boots. Once she saw
165. 13:38a woman who was talking to her daughter  over the wire fence between two compounds.
166. 13:42Grese beat and kicked her so brutally that  the prisoner remained lying on the ground.
167. 13:48She was also accused of selections of veteran  female inmates for gas chambers. With her lover,
168. 13:54doctor Josef Mengele, they often performed  these selections together. When the women
169. 13:58were sent to the gas chamber, Grese entered  that up in her books as "special treatment".
170. 14:04Survivors later remembered how these female  prisoners were very often paraded naked and
171. 14:08inspected like cattle to be selected whether they  were fit enough to work in Germany or only fit to
172. 14:13die. Grese would be there keeping order and if  some women ran away, she would bring her back to
173. 14:19give her a beating. When she saw relations  trying to get together in selections for
174. 14:23forced work, she would beat them until they were  unconscious and leave them lying on the ground.
175. 14:28The female prisoners that tried to escape such  selections and were brought back, were terribly
176. 14:32beaten until they bled all over the place  and were put back in their lines again.
177. 14:37During one such selection, when two girls trying  to escape jumped out of the window and were lying
178. 14:42on the ground, Grese mercilessly shot  them with her always loaded pistol.
179. 14:46However, Grese also helped some prisoners.
180. 14:49This was the case of prisoner named  Alice Tenenbaum, then 14 years old,
181. 14:54who was sent to the gas chamber by Josef Mengele  16 times and every one of those times Grese would
182. 14:59save her by going into the gas chamber and taking  Tenenbaum out. After the war, Alice learned,
183. 15:05the reason Grese saved her so many times was  because she looked like Irma’s sister, Helene.
184. 15:10At Auschwitz, Grese had two huge dogs that she  starved. Survivors recalled her riding around camp
185. 15:16on a bicycle with dogs at her side accompanying  the female inmates on their 16-kilometer trek
186. 15:21to work. Those who could not keep up with  the column, she ordered the dogs to attack.
187. 15:25On one occasion when the female kommando was  carrying stones from outside into the camp,
188. 15:30the female prisoners hesitated and lost control of  their wagon. It swayed, bowled down the hill, and
189. 15:37capsized, scattering stones over the whole area. One survivor later testified, what happened
190. 15:42afterward: “Irma sicced the two police dogs on  them. The girls tried to escape their fangs,
191. 15:47but the trained killers easily overtook  them. The dogs were tearing at the girls’
192. 15:52bodies. Irma came closer to observe what  they were doing. Her eyes were bloodshot.
193. 15:57The sight of blood seemed to intoxicate her.”  All this time Irma Grese had smile on her face.
194. 16:04Sometimes when Grese went  out with her working parties,
195. 16:06she used to beat women and kicking  them with her heavy top-boots.
196. 16:09Another of her specialties was sending  women outside the wire fence when they
197. 16:14were working to make it appear they were  attempting to escape. And when one guard
198. 16:18refused to shoot the women crossing the  fire fence on the grounds that they had
199. 16:22been sent over deliberately, Grese gave  evidence at an enquiry against this guard.
200. 16:27Thanks to the plunder from the  murdered victims in Birkenau,
201. 16:29Irma also had her choice of the finest  clothing from all over Europe. Grese
202. 16:33had her dresses tailored by the best Jewish  dressmakers who would become camp’s prisoners
203. 16:37and she was particularly fond of a  sky-blue jacket with a dark blue tie.
204. 16:41Irma would spend hours in front of her dressing  mirror styling her hair and imagining herself
205. 16:46as a movie star. Grese once declared, “After  the war, I am going to be in films. You will
206. 16:52see my name as a star on the screen. I know  life and I have seen many things. I feel my
207. 16:58experiences will be useful in my career  as an artist.” However, she was wrong.
208. 17:03Irma Grese left Auschwitz on the 18th of  January 1945 when Soviet forces approached
209. 17:09the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the  SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
210. 17:14These forced marches of concentration camp  prisoners became known as the death marches.
211. 17:19The prisoners had to march over long distances  under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
212. 17:24Grese accompanied one such forced transport  from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and from there
213. 17:30to Bergen-Belsen where she arrived along with a  large number of Ravensbrück prisoners in March
214. 17:341945. Those who collapsed or could not keep pace,  were shot by the SS. The prisoners got almost no
215. 17:41food during these death marches and there was  no food when they arrived at the camp either.
216. 17:45According to the inmates, who were lucky  enough to survive the war at Bergen-Belsen,
217. 17:49the daily portion of food consisted of watery  soup made from a variety of turnips cooked
218. 17:54in water and 3 and half centimeters of bread a  day. Sanitary conditions at Bergen Belsen were
219. 18:00terrible and there was no water for washing  and hardly enough for drinking and cooking.
220. 18:04The camp was so overcrowded that during the winter  months when it was freezing cold, the prisoners
221. 18:10had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor  and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a
222. 18:15camp of tens of thousands of prisoners. In March  1945, due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak
223. 18:21of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality  rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300.
224. 18:28At Bergen-Belsen, Grese kept mistreating the  prisoners who according to her own words “were
225. 18:34so dirty and ill “ until the bitter end. Even here she enjoyed not only beating
226. 18:39and kicking starved prisoners but also making  them kneel and hold stones over their heads.
227. 18:44They were also often forced to stand for hours  in snow, ice, and rain from 3:00 to 9:00 AM.
228. 18:51Despite the fact that people were dying  all around at Bergen-Belsen, Grese would
229. 18:56not only keep stripping female prisoners  and beating them with a rubber truncheon,
230. 18:59but she would also submit them to punitive  physical exercises in which the women would
231. 19:03have to march, run or do frog jumps  until they collapsed from exhaustion.
232. 19:08About a fortnight before the British troops  arrived, when it was apparent that the war
233. 19:13was over, she was seen beating a girl with a  riding crop. Upon the eve of liberation Grese
234. 19:18knocked together the heads of two sisters when  she caught them trying to eat potato peel scraps
235. 19:22from the camp kitchen. Even though she worked  at the camp for only three and a half weeks,
236. 19:27she was so cruel that the prisoners  dubbed her “The Beast of Belsen.”
237. 19:31On the 17th of April 1945, 2 days after Bergen  Belsen’s liberation, Irma Grese was captured
238. 19:37by the British forces together with her fellow  Nazi criminal colleagues such as Josef Kramer,
239. 19:42the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and  the last commandant of Bergen Belsen.
240. 19:47Grese and other SS female guards were temporarily  imprisoned in a Wehrmacht panzer training academy
241. 19:53about three kilometers from Belsen. At this  time when she was interviewed by an English
242. 19:57journalist who asked her why she had committed the  crimes she had, Irma unashamedly replied, “It was
243. 20:03our duty to exterminate anti-social elements  so that Germany’s future would be assured.”
244. 20:09Justice finally caught up with Grese  when she was tried at the Belsen Trial
245. 20:14which began on the 17th of September 1945. During the trial when the witnesses claimed
246. 20:20that she was the worst SS woman in the camp, Grese  responded that they were all lying, exaggerating
247. 20:25and making an elephant out of a small fly. Grese only admitted to the beatings,
248. 20:30but never killing anyone. However, her  lies did not help her escape justice.
249. 20:35On the 17th of November, The British Military  tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death by hanging.
250. 20:42She was 22 years old when the British executioner  Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on the
251. 20:4813th of December,1945. Walking to the gallows her  final and only word was "schnell" meaning quickly.
252. 20:56Grese was the youngest woman to die judicially  under British law in the 20th century.
253. 21:02There were no tears shed for Irma Grese.
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