Irma was not a popular girl in school and was apparently bullied. She led a lonely existence typical of a serial killer’s childhood. Her sister, attempting to defend Irma against the accusations leveled at her, testified that Irma was cowardly and would run away when threatened, and therefore was incapable of committing violent acts. Of course, we know better. If she ran away she might have stored enormous reserves of rage until she had an opportunity for “payback” as a camp guard over helpless inmates.
Irma was obsessed with her activities in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls [Maidens])—the Nazi version of the Girl Scouts. Perhaps this is where she found acceptance, having been rejected by her schoolmates. Consequently, her already low marks at school suffered even more. She quit school in 1938 at the age of 15. She worked as a nurse’s aide in the SS sanatorium Hohenlychen for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse.
After she failed to secure the apprenticeship, probably because of her low school grades, Irma was recommended by her boss at Hohenlychen in 1941 for a position in the SS female concentration camp service. She was interviewed, but told that at 17, she was still too young. For a year she ended up employed as a machine operator on a dairy farm.230
When Irma turned 18 in 1942, and became eligible, she successfully entered the SS-Helferinnenkorps, the female volunteer auxiliary service in the SS, which provided a range of services from secretarial to prison and camp custodial in the SS and security police. Irma claims that the German Labor Service, which enforced mandatory employment for all young Germans, arbitrarily assigned her to the job. This is unlikely, as women who were drafted into the service were classified as SS-Kriegshelferinnen (“war auxiliaries”) to differentiate them from the more worthy SS-Helferinnen volunteers.231
Irma began her training as a guard in July 1942 at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. The ethos of Nazi concentration camp guards was brutal: Pity or mercy were seen as signs of weakness. It was drummed into the trainees’ heads that inmates were enemies of the state and must be treated brutally at all times. In a kind of distillation of psychopathy, guards were not permitted to speak to inmates other than in an official capacity to ensure that inmates remained anonymous subjects for their brutality.
To ensure the unemotional performance of torture and punishment of inmates, usually by whipping with a stick or rod, with twenty-five strokes as the minimum for minor infraction and a thousand as the maximum, punishment was carried out by guards other than those who assigned it or reported the prisoner. This ensured that the guard had no personal or emotional sadistic investment in assigning punishment and that at the same time no guards could escape meting out beatings, even if they did not themselves report prisoners for infractions. Everyone had to participate.
SS guards were required to be uncompromisingly tough and to hate the inmates under their charge. When it rained, guards were prohibited to seek shelter when supervising outdoor work details. They had to show themselves to be as tough and/or tougher than the inmates they supervised.
A female inmate at Ravensbrück recalls the teenage girls arriving for training as guards:
The beginners usually appeared frightened upon first contact with the camp, and it took some time to attain the level of cruelty and debauchery of their seniors. Some of us made a rather grim little game of measuring the time it took for a new Aufseherin to win her stripes. One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, who was at first so ignorant of proper camp “manners” that she said “excuse me” when walking in front of a prisoner, needed exactly four days to adopt the requisite manner, although it was totally new for her.
It would be a reasonable estimate that about half of the guards took visible pleasure in striking and terrorizing their prisoners, especially the weak, ill, and frightened. Others dealt their blows with the coarseness and simplicity of a peasant whipping her donkey, some simply acted for the sake of conformity particularly in front of their colleagues or the SS men. In any case, even the best of them showed no adverse reaction when a prisoner was beaten in their presence.232
No “adverse reaction:” no subjectivization of the victim, no emotion, no empathy, no mercy or feeling—a psychopathic state artificially induced through indoctrination from childhood, hard conditioning, and discipline. But blatant sadistic behavior in concentration camps was paradoxically condemned by the Nazis as “indecent.” Murder was to be committed coldly for noble state reasons, not for personal, depraved satisfaction, and SS men who killed for their own pathological gratification or material gain (as Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, had) were tried and sentenced to prison terms or executed by SS tribunals.233
On her first visit home, Irma arrived wearing her camp guard uniform and was promptly beaten by her father and told to never return, her sister testified at Irma’s trial.
After a year’s service at Ravensbrück, Irma was sent in March 1943 to what some SS doctors bitterly called “anus mundi”—the “asshole of the world”—a swampy hellhole the size of about forty American city blocks: the Auschwitz-Birkenau megadeath camp. This was a third-generation camp combining a forced labor concentration camp with a huge annihilation facility. Double railway spurs snaked directly into the camp with packed cargo trains backed up along the line attempting to unload thousands of Jewish deportees daily from the most distant towns and cities of occupied Europe—places like Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia. (The Jews of Germany, Poland, Russia, and northern and central Europe had already been mostly murdered—either shot on location or in the second-generation annihilation camps.)
They would be forced off the train on “the ramp” and they would undergo “selection”—those to live sent in one direction and those to die sent in another, toward four huge combination crematoria / gas chambers the size of railway stations. One can see them today in aerial photographs filmed by passing USAF B-17 bombers on the way to targets in the vicinity. One can easily compare the immense size of these killing facilities next to train cars parked nearby on the spur in the photos. Two of the huge underground gas chambers could easily accommodate 1,200–1,500 victims each.
SS doctors on the ramp “selected” the very old, the very young, the weak, sick, or infirm to walk about a five-minute distance from the ramp to the nearest gas chamber. Of course, one did not need a medical degree to tell who was fit for slave labor—anybody could do that. But by their “selection” of who lived or died, the physicians were now actually taking the responsibility unto themselves for the killing, rendering murder into the realm of a medical procedure ordered by a doctor. As Victor Brack, chief of Germany’s “euthanasia” program said, “The syringe belongs in the hand of the physician.”
Those “ordinary” men—the cops who blew out the brains of kids and their screaming mothers one by one—ended up as mental cases. The Nazis discovered they could synthesize psychopathy temporarily, but they couldn’t make it persist: The killers were bothered by what they were doing. So at Auschwitz they medicalized and assembly-lined the procedure. It was no longer murder—no more than a surgeon plunging a razor-sharp instrument inside a patient’s body is murder. It was “racial hygiene,” practiced by professional physicians. They were healing the German race by destroying the Jewish bacillus infecting it. There were always physicians on the ramp, with a second shift of physicians on standby in case the first needed to be relieved.234
Again we see a type of state-induced “artificial psychopathy”—a psuedoscientific medical rationalization for serial killing. One survivor, a scientist himself, stated that the ramp physicians began using a medical term, therapia magna,* as a joke at first but then seriously:
They considered themselves performing Therapia Magna Auschwitzciense. They would even use the initials TM. At first it was mockingly and ironically, but gradually they began to use them simply to mean the gas chambers. So that whenever you see the initials T M, that’s what it means. The phrase was invented by Schumann who fancied himself an academic intellectual among the
intelligentsia of Auschwitz doctors.235
The physicians “selected” mostly old and middle-aged men, women, and children under 14 to die. Healthy young men and women and those with needed skills were sent to work, unless the young woman was carrying an infant in her arms, in which case she was selected to die with her child. (Somebody had to carry the infant into the gas chamber.) Occasionally, trusted inmates working on the ramps would discreetly whisper to a young mother to give her child to an elderly relative to carry when approaching the selection. This would save her life, but not that of her infant. Other mothers understated their child’s age, hoping to save them from hard labor, unwittingly condemning their own child to death in the gas chamber.
Those “selected” by the physicians would become walking dead, sent directly from the ramp to the gas chambers. They would be ushered into huge subsurface undressing rooms to prepare for a “shower.” There they would be told to hang their clothing carefully on numbered pegs and reminded to tie their shoes together by the laces so they would not get lost. (It made it easier to sort the victims’ clothing afterward if it was already sized and the shoes paired.) They would be told to hurry along into the shower in the next room before the hot water ran out or before the coffee and breakfast that awaited them grew cold. And off they went.
Once packed into the huge concrete chamber with dummy shower heads, the airtight door would be suddenly slammed shut behind them, the lights turned off, and cyanide gas pellets would be poured by medical orderlies (again medics) from the roof into four vented, metal mesh columns dispersed along the length of the chamber. The cyanide gas was a commercial product that was released from the pellets once exposed to warm air. Called Zyklon-Bl (Cyclone B), it was designed to kill rats in granaries by gas so as not to contaminate the grain or storage facility with pesticides. The SS demanded that the manufacturer produce special batches of the gas without the “irritant” warning odor intended to alert people of its presence. The manufacturer balked, claiming it would endanger the patent they held on Zyklon-Bl if they did that. The SS insisted. Special custom-made batches were delivered without the irritant. The gas was odorless and painless to the victims, killing them through rapid respiratory and cardiac arrest and oxygen depletion in the blood. Victims did not “choke” on the gas, they just dropped dead with seizures. But it was a horrible death, nonetheless, with victims packed tightly among naked, dying strangers in pitch-black dark, clawing on each other in respiratory and cardiac paralysis in ever gradually expanding circles from the mesh columns.
The four crematoria gas chambers were capable of easily killing approximately 10,000 people a day—each. The problem was not killing, but disposing of the bodies. At maximum capacity, the crematoriums combined together could only burn 5,000 bodies every twenty-four hours. But furnaces frequently broke down, forcing corpses to be burned in huge, hellish, smoking, open-air pits at the camp’s perimeter. Bones and ash would be ground to dust and hauled away in dump trucks for disposal in the nearby river. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million people were killed this way at Auschwitz, mostly Jews, but Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and other “subhumans” as well.
The Auschwitz camp and its satellites were like a small slave kingdom, with the registered inmate population totaling 155,000 at its maximum. These inmates were put to work “processing” the corpses, emptying the gas chambers, extracting gold teeth, and sorting the belongings of the dead to be shipped back to Germany for profit. They also worked in the kitchens, gardens, warehouses, clinics, and artisan shops that supported the enterprise of death or on construction gangs expanding the already huge camp perimeter to accommodate more and more victims to gas and burn, day in and day out, trainload by trainload.
“Sport”
So it was here at Auschwitz that little blonde Irma Grese—the former Nazi Girl Scout and wannabe nurse—at the tender age of 19 was assigned to supervise a camp section with thirty thousand female inmates, those chosen from the ramp to temporarily live a little longer. That is, as long as they did not get sick or collapse, could do the work assigned to them, committed no infraction real or imagined, and were lucky not to have encountered some idle SS man or female SS-Aufseherin like Irma in a bad mood swing looking to “sport” with inmates.
To “sport.” It was a guard’s term, meaning to idly brutalize prisoners for no reason other than to relieve the boredom; technically an offense, but as long as it did not “get out of hand” the authorities looked the other way. Irma’s “sport” was to order women to retrieve something thrown beyond the safety line, which delineated, at the camp perimeters, an area beyond which prisoners were not allowed to venture. Guards were under strict orders to shoot to kill, with no warning shot, any prisoner who stepped beyond this perimeter. On average, Irma was reported sending thirty women a day to die in this manner, until one SS guard refused to shoot a woman ordered out by Irma into the kill zone. He was charged with a violation of camp regulations, but when the SS inquiry discovered the circumstances, he was returned to duty and Irma was transferred from the detail.236 Irma was too much even for the SS.
One surviving inmate recalls that when Irma arrived at Auschwitz she appeared to be “a young girl in my eyes about 18–19, with a round, full face and two long braids.” The inmate was transferred to another section and did not see Ilse for several months. When she saw her again she was stunned by the dramatic transformation. She had “slimmed down, her hair was up in a bun, the uniform immaculate and she had a cap over her head and on her waist was a belt and a pistol.”
With her stunning blonde good looks, the teenage Irma had become the center of attention. Some sources allege she became the lover of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, a handsome, wounded war hero physician who worked on the ramp in an immaculately tailored uniform and conducted horrific medical experiments on dwarfs and child twins in his spare time. One of his experiments consisted of attempting to change eye color by injecting dyes directly into the iris. Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death,” would whistle Schumann tunes as he “selected” on the ramp or scrapped bone marrow samples from screaming children without an anesthetic. Witnesses placed Irma on the ramp when Mengele was there. She brutally beat and kicked people who were attempting to bypass the selection or to switch lines afterward.
An inmate physician stated that Irma had a fixation on women with large breasts and would inevitably whip their breasts to the point that they would become infected. She would always make a point of being present when the physician treated the painful infection, “swaying back and forth with a glassy-eyed look” as the inmate cried in pain.
Irma carried a special lightweight cellophane whip that was particularly painful and cutting that she had custom-made in one of the camp workshops. She kept prisoners standing for hours during roll call, mercilessly beating and stomping any inmate who collapsed. She forced prisoners to kneel for hours, killing anyone who keeled over. She rode around the camp on a bicycle, shooting prisoners with her handgun.
It is hard to sort fact from fiction in some of the testimony. One witness testified that Irma was accompanied by a German shepherd—trained by her to bite the breasts of female inmates—which she would unleash on prisoners who fell behind in convoys. But this is unlikely as specially trained dog handlers were in charge of the animals, each paired with its handler. One could not just “borrow” a guard dog.
It was said that Mengele broke up with Irma when he learned that she was having lesbian affairs with other inmates, something strictly prohibited by not only camp regulations but German law as well. Again, the portrayal of the female defendant as somehow sexually depraved is reminiscent of the charges leveled against Ilse Koch. The witnesses against her were mostly female and accusations of Irma’s lesbianism might be reflective of female taboos of the period if we follow historian Przyrembel’s logic.
When Auschwitz was closed down as the Red Army approached in December 1945, Irma accompanied prisoner transfers to Ravensbrück and then to the temporary transit
camp of Belsen. By then the Third Reich was collapsing and the camp administration basically ignored the needs of the overcrowded, sick, and starving camp population. When British troops liberated Belsen, they found Irma and other female and male guards surrounded by mountains of emaciated corpses, most dying from deadly typhus. Bulldozers were used to push the tangled piles of corpses into mass graves. Irma was arrested on the spot and put on trial in September 1945 along with forty-four other defendants in one of the earliest war crimes trials after World War Two.
During her trial, the press was mesmerized by the beauty queen looks of the now 21-year-old defendant. She had chosen to remain at Belsen because she had fallen in love with one of the SS men there and now he was in the dock with her. Every day Irma brought a comb with her to carefully set her hair in blonde ringlets during the trial breaks.
In the trial Irma denied some of the specific or more lurid charges, but freely admitted to beating and torturing prisoners because it was the only way she “could keep order.” She denied using a whip at Auschwitz, claiming she “only” beat prisoners with her hands, but admitted that she used a whip at Belsen because the prisoners were in such derelict condition that she would not want to touch them.
Throughout the trial Grese appeared contemptuous of the proceedings. She showed no emotion as the prosecution rolled films of the piles of corpses discovered at Belsen.
Irma Grese was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on December 13, 1945—the youngest woman hanged by the British in the twentieth century.
The Making of State Serial Killers
Irma Grese was not “following orders” when she beat and murdered her victims. She was clearly freelancing—to the point that the SS themselves thought she was excessive and had her transferred from perimeter duty after one too many “sporting” killings of inmates.
Both male and female guards in Nazi concentration camps were conditioned to suppress any empathy they may have had with the inmates, a primary characteristic of psychopathy. They were stripped of the ability to perceive the inmates in any way other than the generic “enemy of the state.” No private communication was allowed between the prisoners and guards. Auschwitz was a murderous kingdom where killing was the norm. How could Irma Grese be anything but what she was in an environment like that with the conditioning she had?*
Female Serial Killers Page 44