“We Have No Pity”
Working on a farm and later as a nurse, Irma Grese was to become the epitome of Adolf Hitler’s vision for young German womanhood, resolute, unyielding, and devoid of compassion. She was also the epitome of inhuman sadism, torture beyond belief, and extravagant murder. Embodied in everything Irma Grese did were the words of Hitler, “We are a race of savages and have no pity.”
Irma came from a good, hardworking family and, at an early age, was shocked by the licentiousness of the corrupt Weimar Republic, a directionless and doomed democratic government that had brought Germany to financial chaos following World War I. Like many well-intentioned but unthinking German youths, Irma joined Nazi youth groups in defiance of her father’s wishes, believing Hitler would set a sound moral leadership for her country. She soon became immersed in her politics and the military superiority of Germany, obsessed with the half-baked theories of the Nazis, replacing a normal sex life with her fanatic activities in the party. It would be later pointed out with justifiable reason that Irma, when in absolute charge of more than thirty thousand helpless female prisoners at Auschwitz, manifested her sexual urges in the form of the most bestial sadism and killings committed by any woman in this century.
She was initiated as a concentration camp supervisor in Ravensbruck in 1942, then moved on to Auschwitz. (On the one occasion that she returned home during this period, her father beat her senseless after learning that she worked in these death camps.) The plain-looking, bigboned Irma arrived at Auschwitz at the height of the Nazi commitment to eradicate the Jews. She attacked this problem with unswerving fanaticism. Rising promptly at 7:00 A.M., seven days a week, Irma dressed in her man’s SS uniform, slipping on heavy hobnailed boots. She strapped on a pistol and snatched up a whip. She was ready for work.
Even the mental torture Irma worked on prisoners was excruciating. She obtained lists of those scheduled to be sent to the gas chambers. Knowing full well when the prisoners would be sent to their death, Irma toyed with the inmates. She would say to one, “You’re lucky—you have another two weeks.” When the woman or child would appear relieved, Irma would smile and order the inmate killed at once. She dangled doom like a worm before a trout, telling another, “Your turn comes on Friday, so think about it.”
She played barbarous games to amuse herself. At dawn Irma would place a shovel or pick outside the barbed wire enclosing a sand pit where hundreds of Jewish women labored each day. When the women were at work Irma would point to one and order her to retrieve the tool on the other side of the loosely stranded wire; she was always careful to select a woman who did not understand German. When the inmate would step through the wire to get the tool, the guard in the tower would shout a warning in a language the inmate did not understand. When the prisoner did not respond but went blindly to retrieve the tool, the guard shot her to death. On these frequent occasions, Irma’s laughter rattled along with the deadly bursts of machine-gun fire.
Constant companions of this nightmare figure were two savage Alsatian hounds. Irma ordered these dogs, which were kept half starved, to attack and kill any prisoner who displeased her. As the dogs pinned the prisoner to the ground, Irma would jump on the inmate’s stomach full force, then literally kick the woman or child to death. Often as not she whipped prisoners to near death in a wild frenzy which would burst from her without warning at any moment.
Though she later claimed that her pistol was never loaded, she was seen on numerous occasions to shoot prisoners to death at will. When spotting one woman staring at prisoners being unloaded from trucks, Irma took out her pistol, walked up to the woman, smiled, asked if she was enjoying the view, then blew away her face. Two young girls refused to leave their barracks while others were lining up in front of gas chambers. Irma dragged them screaming from beneath their beds. The girls leaped from windows and began running wildly across the concentration camp compound. Irma shot both dead in their tracks.
When seeing a woman sobbingly talk to her little daughter through barbed wire, Irma rushed to the woman and beat her to death. Like the hellish Ilse Koch, Irma followed the perverse fad of having the skins of murdered prisoners made into lampshades. Reported Gerald Sparrow, “In her own house Irma had had the skins of three victims made into the most attractive lampshades, because she discovered that human skin, though it was tough and durable, also let the light through in a most pleasing way.”
In 1945 Irma Grese was transferred briefly to another horror camp, Belsen, and was captured by Allied troops at the close of the war. Survivors of the death camps came forward in scores to testify against her at her war crimes trial. She faced her accusers stoically, calmly telling her judges, “Himmler is responsible for all that has happened, but I suppose I have as much guilt as the others above me.” But she displayed no regret, no remorse: To her all the inmates of the satanic camps in which she ruthlessly murdered were nothing more than subhuman “dreck.” Her philosophy was that of another war criminal, Hermann Göring, who proclaimed, “I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.”
The reality of the woman’s incredible sadism was clearly revealed as the damning testimony spilled forth. She listened but did not react as survivors of her brutality told how she delighted in selecting female prisoners with large breasts and how she would then cut their breasts open with her whip. She would next take these bleeding women, according to historian Raul Hilberg, writing in The Destruction of the European Jews, “to a woman inmate doctor who performed a painful operation on them while Irma Grese watched, cheeks flushed, swaying rhythmically and foaming at the mouth.”
A British court, many of its members nauseated at the horrifying testimony, condemned the bestial Irma Grese to death. She was hanged on December 13, 1945, in Hamelin, Germany.
JRN