Irma Grese - Background

Background

Irma Grese was born to Alfred Grese, a dairy worker and a member of the Nazi Party from 1937, and Berta Grese. Irma Grese had four siblings. In 1936, her mother committed suicide.

Grese left school in 1938 at the age of fourteen, owing to a combination of a poor scholastic aptitude, bullying by classmates, and a fanatical preoccupation with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), a Nazi female youth organization, of which her father disapproved. Among other casual jobs, she worked as an assistant nurse in the sanatorium of the SS for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse, after which she worked as a dairy helper.

Quoted below is Irma Grese's testimony, under direct examination, about her background:

I was born on 7 October 1924. In 1938 I left the elementary school and worked for six months on agricultural jobs at a farm, after which I worked in a shop in Luchen for six months. When I was 15 I went to a hospital in Hohenluchen, where I stayed for two years. I tried to become a nurse but the Labour Exchange would not allow that and sent me to work in a dairy in Fürstenburg. In July, 1942, I tried again to become a nurse, but the Labour Exchange sent me to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, although I protested against it. I stayed there until March, 1943, when I went to Birkenau Camp in Auschwitz. I remained in Auschwitz until January, 1945.

Having completed her training in March 1943, Grese was transferred as a female guard to Auschwitz, and by the end of that year was Senior Supervisor, the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners.

In January 1945, Grese briefly returned to Ravensbrück before ending her wartime career at Bergen-Belsen as a Work Service Manager from March to April. She was captured by the British on 17 April 1945, together with other SS personnel who did not flee.