‘The Beautiful Beast’: Why was Irma Grese evil?

Tom Clark

Abstract:

Irma Grese is, perhaps, the most notorious female concentration camp guard convicted in the
aftermath of WWII. Often pictured dressed in her jack-boots and high-waisted belt, she lives on in
the collective memory of the public as a „paragon of evil‟. This paper explores why a relatively
junior female member of the SS auxiliary service has been singled out as a key conspirator in the
story of the Nazi atrocities. Using the trial transcripts from „the Belsen Trial‟ and other secondary
sources that depict Grese, the paper explores her life and death, the explanations offered with
respect to the engagement of the German public with the „dirty work‟ of the Nazi regime, the
sexualisation of the „SS women‟, and images of evil women more generally. The paper argues that
the depiction of Grese as a young „beautiful‟ and unrepentant woman, is one that symbolises
extreme deviance. A narrative within a narrative, her story is constructed to transgress our
gendered expectations of the atrocities of war and the extreme deviance of the Nazi regime and
the SS in particular. Given the resulting collective failure to account for her involvement she
similarly transgresses our expectations of explanation and thereby becomes more deviant as a
result. As an image of dangerous femininity „the beautiful beast‟ also conforms to some deeply
entrenched stereotypes of evil women. However, she transgresses even these myths by being
seen to reject the home in favour of the state, and by occupying a position of power within a
dangerous state system. Grese is a woman „out of place‟ – and the consequences of deviating from
being an „angel of the house‟ are there for all to see in the lurid descriptions of her crimes, and in
the collective memory of Belsen itself.

Keywords: extreme deviance; sexuality; femininity; Nazi Germany; Belsen; Nazisploitation; evil

Word Count: 17,309 (excluding references)

Dr TOM CLARK is a Lecturer in Research Methods at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of
Sheffield. His current interests include: the sociology of evil; methodological innovation; and, novel
applications of social theory.

Address: Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield,
S10 2TU. [email: t.clark@sheffield.ac.uk; phone: 0114 222 6446 ; fax: 0114 276 8125]

Citation: Clark, T. (2012) „„The Beautiful Beast‟: Why was Irma Grese evil?‟ Working paper produced for the
Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield.
 ‘The Beautiful Beast’: Why was Irma Grese evil?

On Friday the 13th of December, 1945, Albert Pierrepoint placed a white cloth cap over
the head of a „bonny‟ blonde haired young German woman and continued to fix a noose
around her neck. „Schnell‟ she said to him as he positioned her feet on the white chalk
marks atop the Hangman‟s trapdoor. Pierrepoint acquiesced and pulled the lever to the
trap - the door promptly crashed down. Her lifeless body would hang motionless in the
execution chamber of Hameln Gaol for the next twenty minutes before it was removed,
placed in a coffin, and taken to the prison yard for burial1. At the age of 22, Irma Ilse
Ida Grese, the youngest women to be executed under British law in the 20 th Century,
was dead.

Grese was one of thirteen prisoners executed by Pierrepoint that day, and she was one
of eleven who were sentenced to death at the Belsen Trial. Pierrepoint chose to hang
Grese and the two other women sentenced to death at the trial first because he did not
want to subject them to „the sounds of the drop‟. The men that followed, including Josef
Kramer and Dr Fritz Klien, were then hung in four pairs of two. Every Christmas for a
number of years thereafter, Pierrepoint would receive a “plain envelope with a five
pound note in it”. Accompanying the first, there was a scrap of paper enclosed. On it was
just one word: BELSEN.

Pierrepoint‟s (1974, p 145-148) account of the execution of Irma Grese has become
somewhat canonical in the story of her life and death2. Tried and condemned to death at
what is known as either „the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others‟ or simply „the Belsen
Trial‟, she has assumed a somewhat unique position in the annals of criminal history. As
one of the few women who have been popularly considered to be guilty of „crimes

1
Her remains are widely reported to have been moved in the early 1950s and reburied in the nearby Wehl
Cemetery.
2
Although in a bizarre and unlikely twist on the Grese narrative, some holocaust revisionists have sought to
uestio the e a it of Pie epoi t s e sio of events. This alternative narrative – all too easily reproduced by
those with an interest in the supernatural - suggests that Pierrepoint refused to conduct the hanging and when
Samuel Lutzheim, a local Jewish hangman, was chosen for the task, Grese vowed to return from the dead if he
touched her. When Lutzheim tried to place the rope around her neck, Grese violently resisted and had to be
forcibly restrained by Lutzheim. According to the tale, the hanging was not executed properly and Grese was
seen to be violently struggling at the end of the noose for up to three minutes before her body went limp. In
revenge for being hung by Lutzheim, her ghost is now supposed to haunt the area that was previously
occupied by Krema III in Auschwitz.
against humanity‟3 , the „beautiful beast of Belsen‟ has entered into popular collective
memory as one of the worst war criminals of World War II and certainly one of the most
notorious. Brown (1996, p xvii) highlights that she is often cited as “being responsible
for the most savage killing spree by any woman in the twentieth century” and her
narrative is frequently regurgitated in pulp „true crime‟ books as an exemplar par
excellence of the „evil woman‟. Alongside a seemingly very limited rogue‟s gallery of
other infamous „women who kill‟, she is often taken to be a central reference point within
the popular literature on mass murderers and evil women more generally. In one such
example, Glyn-Jones exclaims: “She was epitome of inhuman sadism, torture beyond
belief, and extravagant murder” (1996, p 231).

However, she was far from the only woman convicted of war crimes at the Belsen Trial,
which itself centred on two particular charges relating to the conduct of the guards at the
Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps: “They were accused in the first place of
having committed individually murders and other offences against the camp inmates,
and in the second place of having all knowingly participated in a common plan to operate
a system of ill-treatment and murder in these camps” (United Nations War Crimes
Commission, 1947, p 1). Of the forty-five originally brought before the British military
court, thirty of the defendants were found guilty on one or two of the charges -
seventeen of those found guilty were women; fourteen were acquitted - including five
women; and one defendant was removed from the trial due to illness. Alongside the
death sentences for Grese, Borman, and Volkenrath: Herta Ehlert, and Helena Kopper
were sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment; Ilse Forster, Herta Bothe, Irene Hasch,
Gertrud Sauer, Hildegard Lobauer, Johanne Roth, Anna Hempel and Stanislawa
Starotska were sentenced to ten years; Gertrude Fiest for five years, Freda Walter for
three, and Hilde Lisiewitz one year.

There are thought to have been as many as 3,500 women 4 who worked in the
concentration camps during the war, and a variety of other so-called SS Women5 were

3
See her Wikipedia entry for a brief example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irma_Grese [last accessed
24/09/2012]
4
This commonly reported figure, though rarely referenced, is likely to be derived from Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz
“uh e s suggestio that , o e o ked at ‘a e s u k - where the women camp guards under-went
initial training (Suhren was one of two men to command Ravensbruck during WWII). However, the secretive
structure of the SS, and the lack of official existing documentation, makes this number difficult to verify.
5
Although these o e a e still efe ed to as ““ Wo e , the la el is, pe haps, a little isleadi g. Whilst
women were hired by the SS, they are commonly assumed to have not been allowed to become full members.
also brought to trial and imprisoned or executed at other trials in the aftermath the war.
Ilse „the bitch of Buchenwald‟ Koch and Maria Mendel are perhaps two of the most
infamous. Mandel, an SS-Lagerführerin 6 at Auschwitz, was sentenced to death at the
first „Auschwitz Trial‟ and is popularly attributed to have been responsible of the deaths
of up to 500,000 prisoners. Ilse Koch, the wife of Kamp Kommandment Karl Koch, is
notorious for allegedly making selections for the gas chambers based on the tattoos she
saw whilst the prisoners were awaiting selection and she is often reported to have made
lampshades out the tattooed skin. Many other women, however, were also successfully
prosecuted and a number were executed on account of their conduct at various
concentration camps. Amongst others, Ruth Neudeck was executed for her part in the
running of the gas chambers at Uckermark, a sub-camp of Ravensbruck, where over
5000 women and children are thought to have died under her authority. SS
Oberaufseherin Theodora Binz was the chief wardress of the women‟s block at
Ravenbruck as well as being chief training instructor for the SS women. Brown (1996, pp
33-34) reports one story of her hacking a woman prisoner to death with a pickaxe „until
it was nothing more than a bloody lump. Once this matter was finished, Binz cleaned her
shiny boots with the dry portion of the corpse‟s skirt‟ – all because Binz considered the
woman to not be doing enough work. He goes on to suggest, „[e]ven by SS standards,
Binz‟ behaviour was atrocious‟ (p 33). She was tried and executed by a British court in
May 1947. Five other women, including Gerda Steinhoff, Elisabeth Becker, and the so-
called „beautiful spectre‟ Jenny-Wanda Barkmann were very publically executed for their
part in the regime at Stutthof7 in front of thousands at Biskupia Gorka Hill8. They are
also commonly remembered for their apparent conviviality during the trial. Hermine
Braunsteiner, extradited from the USA to face trial in Germany in 1973, was eventually
convicted for the murder of 80 people, abetting the murder of 102 children, and
collaborating in the murder of 1000 other people. Reports often claim that the German
authorities regarded her as being jointly responsible for over 200,000 deaths during the
war. The last trial of a female guard occurred in 1996 when Luise Danz was prosecuted
for the murder of a young woman that occurred in Malchow toward the end of the war9,

Technically, those women who worked in the camps were SS-Gefolge (SS-Followers) and were an auxiliary
group who were reportedly paid by the government (see Brown, 1996, and Heike, 2008 for further discussion).
6
As an SS-Lagerführerin Ma del as espo si le o l to the a p Ko a a da t .
7
“tutthof is ofte e e e ed as the o pse fa to as the e is so e e ide e of a s all-scale human soap-
production factory.
8
These executions were particularly brutal. Four wooden gallows were specially constructed on a hill outside
Gdansk. The accused were seemingly executed one-by-one and in full view of the crowd and their on-looking
peers. However, due to the short drop, and the lack of a trapdoor – they were simply pushed from the back of
the truck that was serving as a platform – many were clearly seen to struggle for some time as they hung from
the gallows.
9
Danz was originally prosecuted and convicted at the original Auschwitz Trial where she was sentenced to life
imprisonment – she was released in 1956.
but as late as 2008, 84 year-old Elfriede Rinkel was deported from the USA after it was
discovered that she had worked as a guard at Ravesbruck between June 1944 and April
194510.

Perhaps with the exception of Ilse Koch, however, none have achieved the infamy of
Grese. Often pictured dressed in her jack-boots and high-waisted belt, she lives on in the
collective memory of the public as a „paragon of evil‟ (see „The People’, 19-09-10, for
instance). Indeed, on the Wikipedia entry „Female guards in concentration camps‟ it is
her „mugshot‟ that features prominently at the start of the page. The question, therefore,
is why it is Irma Grese that has become symbolic of the many atrocities that the Nazi SS
women were a part of?

Figure 1: Irma Grese (centre) pictured alongside Josef Kramer (left) shortly after the
liberation of Belsen

As the often reported „worst of the SS women‟ the answer may seem obvious to many
onlookers – her crimes were worse than any other. However, as the brief discussion
above has suggested, there were certainly other women, and many, many other men
not mentioned here, who were engaging in acts of seemingly unspeakable cruelty under
the Nazi regime. Comparing their various reported crimes with the aim of classifying the
„worst‟ offenders would seem to be an impossible, if not a completely misleading,

10
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/21/secondworldwar.germany [last accessed, 26/09/2012]
endeavour. Sofsky (1997) estimates that as many as 55,000 SS men and women did
service in the concentration camps – and violence was part of the collective habitus of
the guards, the absolute power of the camp demanded it from each and every member:

“The compulsion to conform to the group and the constraints of

camaraderie, delegation and decentralisation of power, local freedom
to act, terroristic over-regulation, exoneration from responsibility by
means of obedience, the iron tie to authority, the atmosphere of
violence, the frustrations of training and guard duty – all these
factors helped give rise to a habitus among the members of the camp
SS that constituted a mortal danger to the prisoners” (Sofsky, 1997,
p115).

Grese‟s actions were certainly not isolated and she was not a singularly out-standing
aberration of German society.

But if Grese‟s actions were not substantively different to many other SS Guards why has
she been remembered over-and-above other camp guards? Indeed, given the
astonishingly brutal culture of the camps and the SS more generally, why has a
relatively junior female member of the SS auxiliary service been singled out as being a
key actor in the story of SS Women and the Nazi atrocities?

The life and death of Irma Grese

As Brown (1996) suggests, very little is known about Grese‟s life before she entered the
concentration camps, and she appeared to live a somewhat undistinguished existence
before she became an SS-Aufseherin. However, even what is known about her life as a
camp-guard is largely lacking in official documentation and is mostly dependent on
witness testimony.

Therefore, the vast majority of the popular accounts of the early part of her life are
almost inevitably derived from the Belsen Trial and the typical Grese narrative relies on
the scraps of detail provided by the various affidavits and testimonies heard there. In
her own testimony, Grese briefly described her background:

“I was born on 7th October, 1923. 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 Fürstenberg. In July, 1942, I again tried 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” (Phillips, 1949, p 248)

One incident of note given in the many derivative representations of the Grese narrative
was also provided by her sister‟s testimony. When asked about the likelihood of Irma
beating prisoners under her charge, her sister Helene would suggest:

“No. In our schooldays when, as it sometimes happens, girls were

quarrelling and fighting, my sister had never the courage to fight, but on
the contrary she ran away” (Phillips, 1949, p 247).

Whilst this, albeit very limited, character reference would later be used by the
prosecution (and beyond) to suggest that Grese was a „coward turned bully‟ (pp 255 &
260), Helene would also confirm that her mother committed suicide in 1936 and
highlight that upon a visit to the Grese family home, she quarrelled with her father
“because she was in the S.S.”(p 247). She did not return home again11.

Grese‟s first written affidavit would confirm her history with regards to her work as an
Aufseherin in various concentration camps:

11
G ese s fi st depositio su itted to the Belse T ial p o ides a little o e detail: I then told my father
about the concentration camp and he gave me a beating and told me never to come home again p .
G ese as also epo ted to e isi l so i g du i g he siste s testi o .
 “I first went to Ravensbrück, where I was made an Aufseherin and
placed in charge of female working parties consisting of about 20
prisoners. In March, 1943, I was sent to Birkenau near Auschwitz,
where I remained up to January, 1945. I then went to Ravensbrück for
four weeks and arrived at Belsen in March 1945” (p 711).

Indeed, her life at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Belsen, is much more visible
than her pre-war life. At the Belsen Trial there were a number of witnesses who testified
with regards to Grese, and a number of affidavit depositions that were taken from
prisoners shortly after the liberation of Belsen in April 1945 that referred to her were
also submitted as evidence. These individual charges ranged from beatings, using a dog
to attack and terrorise prisoners, as well as being complicit in the murder of particular
individuals and the selections for the gas chambers themselves. The deposition of
Gertrud Diament, for instance, suggests:

“I have seen her at both camps, when in charge of working parties,

beating women and girls with a stick. Her favourite habit was to
beat them until they fell to the ground and then she kicked them as
hard as she could with her heavy boots. She frequently caused
blood to flow and, in my opinion, many of the people she injured
were likely to die from such injuries, but I have no direct evidence
of such deaths. Grese was also responsible for selecting victims for
the gas chamber at Auschwitz” (p 660).

Ilona Stein‟s deposition would further elaborate on her participation in the selections:

“Whilst at Birkenau I have seen Grese making selections with Dr.

Mengele of people to be sent to the gas chamber. On these parades
Grese herself chose the people to be killed in this way. In one
selection about August, 1944, there were between 2000 and 3000
selected. At this selection Grese and Mengele were responsible for
selecting those for the gas chamber. People chosen would sometimes
 sneak away from the line and hide themselves under their beds.
Grese would go and find them, beat them until they collapsed and
then drag them back into the line again” (p 747).

Stein‟s testimony would also suggest that Grese beat her on one occasion and,
countering the suggestion by the defence that they were „light blows‟, Stein would
confirm “[t]he general procedure was a real proper beating” (p 100). Dora Szafran would
corroborate their brutality: “The beatings were very severe. If they were not the cause
of death they were not called severe in the camp” (p 85). Szafran would also directly
accuse Grese of murder:

“the prison doctor, made a selection for the gas chamber, and two
selected girls jumped out of the window and Grese approached them
as they were lying on the ground and shot them twice” (p 90).

Edith Trieger would similarly state that Grese shot a Hungarian women „through the left
breast‟ for not being in her block when a selection was taking place (p 690)12. Ilona
Stein‟s deposition would further describe her position of command at Auschwitz, and that
she was capable of using it to facilitate murder:

“...at one of these selection parades, one Hungarian woman who had
been selected tried to escape from the line and join her daughter in
another line which was for those not chosen. Grese noticed this and
ordered one of the S.S. guards to shoot the woman, which he did. I
did not hear the order, but I saw Grese speak to the guard and he
shot at once…I took her body to the mortuary” (p 747)

Similarly, with regard to her dog, the deposition of Hanka Rozenwayg would suggest
Grese had an ability to follow orders with ruthless efficiency:

12
Grese would later not de that the o a had ee shot, ut I do de that it as e . “he the
suggested that a o a i Ca p C had ee shot a at h-tower guard, but she could not remember if it
was the same woman (p 252).
 “I was employed digging ditches outside the camp. Whilst so
employed I laid down my shovel for a rest, and Lothe, who was in
charge of my working party, saw me. I saw her go to the woman S.S.
guard and I heard her ask the S.S. woman to set her dog on me. I
recognize this S.S. woman as No. 2, on photograph Z/4/2. I did not
know her name, but have since been told that it is Irma Grese. Grese
set her dog on to me and as a result I was bitten by the dog on my
right shoulder. I still have a scar on my shoulder where the dog bit
me. I was made to continue working and I had to dress the wound
myself after I had returned to my block” (p 746).

Gitla Dunkleman‟s deposition would again underline Grese‟s propensity to act brutally:

“I have seen this woman commit many acts of brutality when we

were paraded before her at Appell or for the selection of working
parties. I have seen her strike women about the face and body with a
rubber truncheon and kick them. I have seen her draw blood and
knock women senseless. I have heard her order that the women
should be left unattended on the ground. These parades lasted from
2 to 3 hours. These acts were committed for not standing still at the
parade or other trivial matters. If a person collapsed out of weakness
she would kick and beat them. She was the worst of the women S.S”
(p 661).

In her own defence testimony, Grese‟s response to these accusations was surprising.
Whilst she would largely deny the particular individual charges, unlike some other the
other defendants at the Belsen trial she did not attempt to deny the harsh reality of the
camps and would somewhat brazenly admit to her complicity in the regime. Indeed, it is
clear from her testimony that Grese was fully indoctrinated into the brutal culture of the
camps, which she herself recognised. This sometimes even included inflicting
punishment on other SS Guards. In her testimony she highlighted how “Kommandant
Hoess ordered me to give [an SS Woman] the last two of the 25 strokes with which she
was punished by the order of Reichsführer Himmler. I was then 20” (p 250).
But it was not just the punishment of SS Guards for disobeying orders that she admitted
to participating in and she was very open about the fact that she carried a whip at
Auschwitz, and why she did so. She commented that it was “made out of cellophane...It
was a very light whip, but if I hit somebody with it, it would hurt. After eight days
Kommandant Kramer prohibited the whips, but we nevertheless went on using them. I
never carried a rubber truncheon” (p 249). Later she would admit to beating prisoners
against regulations, and instructing others in her command to beat prisoners despite not
having the authorisation to do so. Her final deposition would state:

“I did, in fact, always have a whip which I used consistently

whenever necessary.... I admit that there was also a walking-
stick...which, although it was unauthorized, we frequently used to
beat prisoners. I usually used to beat them on the shoulders, but
there were times when, because of the numbers involved, they
were beaten on any part of the body that happened to be easiest”
(p 713)

She would also later make the rather contrary clarification, “I have beaten prisoners, but
I have not ill-treated them” (p 260). However, she would dispute the suggestion that
this was done „regularly‟ (p 259), or that she enjoyed it (p 255).

Grese also admitted to supervising the roll-calls within which Dr Josef Menegle would
make the selection for the gas chambers, although she denied making the selections
herself (p 251-252). Elsewhere, whilst she refuted that other Apell parades would go on
for hours, she did highlight that “[e]xtra parades and extra drills are a recognized form
of punishment in the German service” (p 252) and that they would run for “an hour, or
perhaps it might have been two hours. When I said before, three or four hours, that was
an exception” (p 258).

However, she did clearly deny being in charge of a dog or setting one upon the prisoners
– “As I had no dog I could not set it upon Rozenwayg” (p 255); she flatly denied
shooting anyone - “I never shot at all at anyone” (p 251); and she also firmly denied
that she had ever tricked (non German-reading) prisoners into crossing a wire so that
they would be shot for entering a prohibited zone, defiantly proclaiming “You can think
what you like, but it is a lie, and it is wrong” (p 254). Denying another charge, she would
also argue that she “did not beat so many women that I would not be able to remember”
(p 259). She would also refute being „the worst SS woman in the camp‟, retorting: “Yes,
they say so. They are all lying. These people exaggerated and made an elephant out of a
small fly” (p 259).

In spite of these denials and accusations of lying, in his summing up of the case for the
prosecution Colonel Backhouse noted just how open Grese had been: “She is quite frank
about it, and on her own admissions alone I would suggest that at Auschwitz there is
ample evidence to show she was ill-treating, beating and prolonging Appelle. Then she
comes to Belsen and is made Arbeitsdienstfiührerin, and again you have stories as to
how she beat people. She stood at the gate beating them, she beat girls working in the
kitchen, and she beat and beat people and made them do sport” (p 616). In his
summing-up, the Judge Advocate also commentated on the “tremendous amount of
evidence” against her, adding that her admission of her role of the selections was one of
“great frankness” (Playfair and Sington, 1957, p 179).

For Derrick Sington, who was called as a witness at the Trial and would later write a
commentary on the trial, it was not a surprise that Grese was found guilty, or that she
was sentenced to death. It seemed certain that she was guilty as “the evidence of cruelty
on her part was considerable; and she herself had provided some corroboration of it‟,
including her own involvement in the „selections‟” (Playfair and Sington, 1957). He goes
on to argue that this is the single most damaging piece of evidence against her with
reference to her capital sentence as all those on trial who had taken part in the parading
for selections at Auschwitz were ultimately sentenced to death and executed.

However, the case for the prosecution at the trial was very carefully controlled, as
Playfair and Sington (1957) noted:

„in the interrogations carried out at Belsen....a serious effort had

been made to observe standards in selecting witnesses...[and] the
investigators were experienced lawyers and policemen who knew that
 the case they prepared for the prosecution would have to stand up in
a court that would be adhering pretty closely to normal English legal
procedure...Scores of the ex-inmates at Auschwitz and Belsen who
volunteered evidence were rejected as unreliable because of
obviously wild statements or hysterical attitudes‟ (p 161).

The implication would appear to suggest that accusations made in court were somewhat
restrained – the tip of the Irma Grese iceberg. Indeed, one report at the time of the trial
(Newsweek, 01-10-1945) suggested that “this 100-pound German girl invented new
methods of torture. One of them: She waited until a pregnant woman was ready to give
birth, then tied her legs together and watched the agony." Evidently, this does not
appear in the trial transcript, and there is no corroboration within the article itself.
However, it did point toward the increasingly sexualised narratives of torture that would
appear after the trial.

In particular two „eye-witness‟ testimonies would enter into the collective memory as
central points of focus of the Grese narrative. The first was given by Dr Giselle Perl, an
inmate doctor, in her autobiographical account of her own experiences at Auschwitz and
elsewhere. Going much further than the accusations presented at the Belsen Trial, Perl
accuses Grese of purposefully inflicting wounds upon the breasts of inmates so that she
could masturbate at the sight of the resulting surgical procedure:

“[Grese] went around in camp, her bejewelled whip poised, picked

out the most beautiful young women and slashed their breast open
with the braided wire end of her whip. Subsequently those breasts
got infected by the lice and dirt which invaded every nook and corner
of the camp. They had to be cut open, if the patient was to be saved.
Irma Greze [sic] invariably arrived to watch the operation, kicking the
victim if her screams interfered with her pleasure and giving herself
completely to the orgiastic spasms which shook her entire body and
made saliva run down from the corner of her mouth” (Perl, 1948, p
62).
She would also add that she was forcibly made her carry out an abortion on Grese, by
Grese herself. Knowing that to touch a German officer was an offence punishable by
death for a Jew, she duly complied knowing that refusal would similarly result in certain
death at the hands of Grese. Indeed, Perl suggests that after the (successful) abortion
Grese threatened to kill her anyway with Grese apparently commenting: “You are a good
doctor...What a pity you have to die. Germany needs good doctors” (p 64).

Olga Lengyel‟s (1948) auto-biographical account of life as a prisoner in Auschwitz is, in

all probability, the source for much of the accepted information concerning Grese and
her frequently sensationalistic13 account would also graphically suggest that Grese was
using her position in the camp to gain sexual gratification from those under her authority.
Lengyel, an inmate Doctor and apparently a friend of Grese‟s house-maid and dress-
maker, suggests that Grese „was bisexual‟ (p 193) and had repeated homosexual
encounters with prisoners during her time at Auschwitz. Homosexuality was, of course, a
serious moral charge at the time. Unconstrained by the legal requirements of the Trial,
Lengyel would add that when she eventually tired of them, she would send them to the
selections for the gas chambers (p 193).

Lengyel would also accuse Grese of taking heterosexual lovers too – although she would
counter-point this narrative with a particularly brutal tale of Grese‟s conduct toward
them. Spying through the cracks in the wood of one of the huts, Lengyel would suggest
that Grese, having her amorous advances turned down by a „handsome Georgian‟ whose
good looks had been commented upon throughout the camp, Grese made him watch her
brutally beat his lover whilst naked:

“She was in a dreadful state. Red welts extended across her face and
below the opening of her bosom. The sadistic SS had spared not even
her face….I never saw the handsome Georgian again. The beautiful

13
For instance, like Perl, Lengyel recounts an episode in which an inmate Doctor (unnamed) is coerced into
performing an abortion on Grese, with the help of Lengyel, who then goes on to describe the procedure:
What a pi tu e e sa ! I a G eise si , the to tu ess, as a tuall s eati g f o fea . “he trembled and
groaned and was unable to control herself ...[and] could not endure the slightest pain without whining. No
soo e as the ope atio o e tha she ega to p attle. Afte the a , I i te d to go i to pi tu es. You ill
see my name in lights o the a uee. I k o life a d I e see a g eat deal. M e pe ie es ill e useful i
a tisti a ee Le g el, ,p .
 beast had him shot. The girl? ...Griese [sic] had had her sent to the
Auschwitz brothel” (Lengyel, 1948, pp 196-197).

After the incident, Lengyel claims that Grese calmly tried on the clothes that Lengyel and
her dress-maker were delivering – stopping only to deliver a blow, whilst naked, to the
dress-maker for protesting at some of her demands.

The accusations of Grese‟s rampant sexuality would continue and she is often reported
to have also had an intimate relationship with the most notorious Nazi doctor Josef
Mengele. Over fifty years after the supposed liaison, one (typical) report in British
newspaper would suggest “[s]he had a reputation as a nymphomaniac who sexually
abused male and female prisoners. Among her many lovers was brutal camp physician
Josef Mengele” (The Mirror, 21-11-2005). The source of evidence for this union, a
veritable „match made in hell‟, is likely to come from Lengyel – as it is for her alleged
affair with Josef Kramer: “The „angel‟ with the pure face had many love affairs. In the
camp it was gossiped that Kramer and Dr Mengerle [sic] were her chief lovers. But her
greatest affair was with an SS engineer whom she frequently met in the evenings”
(Lengyel, 1948, p 156). There seems to be general agreement that there was a high
degree sexual promiscuity between the SS Guards and the SS women but the evidence
that would support an assertion that this extended to a relationship between Grese and
Mengele appears to be limited to hear-say. However, at the Belsen Trial, it was
established that Grese had asked Kramer for permission to stay at Belsen to be with
another SS man: „I got to know an S.S. man in Auschwitz who was transferred to Belsen,
and that is the reason why I wanted to stay‟. The man in question is now considered to
be Oberscharführer Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger. He occupied a senior construction position
at Auschwitz until Jan 1945 where upon he was transferred to Belsen. He died of typhus
on the 23rd of April 1945.

Both Isabella Leitner (1978, p 41-45) and Kitty Hart would write biographies that appear
to support (or reproduce) the sexualised parts of Lengyel‟s narrative. However, these
were published a long time after the cessation of hostilities, in 1978 and 1981
respectively, by which time the more sensational parts of the Grese narrative were well
entrenched and the extent to which these testimonies provide reliable evidence is
questionable. Elsewhere, three lamp shades fashioned from human skin are commonly
reported to have been found in Grese‟s living quarters. The account of this discovery
offered in the Guardian newspaper is typical: "The skins of three inmates that she [Irma
Grese] had had made into lampshades were found in her hut" (the Guardian, 21-11-
2005). Similarly, in a commentary on famous cases of „women who kill‟ offered by
Gerald Sparrow, a former Judge, he claims: “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 light through in a most pleasing
way.” Sometimes the story includes reference to other items made from human skin,
including, book covers (usually Mein Kampt), gloves, and handbags. However, the
original source of the evidence for these items is inevitably unreferenced. Indeed, given
that Grese is also often given the moniker „the bitch of Belsen‟ – a name that is all too
easily compared to the „bitch of Buchenwald‟ Ilse Koch - it is possible that the two
narratives are being conflated and confused. Like Grese, Ilse Koch is also commonly
perceived to have abused prisoners for her own sexual gratification. However, whilst
there is a tangible source for the discovery of human lamp shades at Koch‟s Buchenwald
residence 14 , and some supporting evidence that suggests that some members of the
Nazi regime were collecting and experimenting with human skin in a number of ways
(see Przyrembel, 2001), there appears to be little direct primary evidence of Grese‟s
direct involvement or any collection of artefacts.

Accounting for evil: Explaining the evil of the Nazi

war criminals
Partly because of the limited evidence concerning her life, and the fact that some of the
later accusations are based on uncorroborated and relatively isolated eye-witness
testimonies, it is possible to question the veracity of some of the more sensational
charges against her. However, as Playfair and Sington (1957) highlight, there is little
doubt that Irma Grese was guilty of willingly participating in the brutal culture of the
concentration camps, and the SS more generally. As Phillips (1949, p xli) suggests,
“though some of the more lurid allegations against her may not be borne out by the
evidence, there are enough, and more than enough, which stand uncontroverted”.
Indeed, she herself did not deny her involvement or her often brutal treatment of
prisoners. Within the popular narrative of her life, therefore, the question then quickly
becomes what made Grese susceptible to such a culture, and why was she evil?

14
Whether Ilse Koch was involved directly involved in the collection of human skin or not is still open to
question. The charges against her in this respect were dropped during her second trial (see Przyrembel, 2001,
for further discussion).
In spite of the tendency to label the concentration camp SS Guards as pathological, the
vast majority of research has generally suggested otherwise. Indeed, according to Waller
(2007, p 62), for many mental health professionals assigned to assess those awaiting
trial at Nuremburg, the question was not whether they would find psychological
disturbance in the accused, but how much. The actions of the Nazi high command
necessarily and essentially made them different to „normal‟ people; the job of the Allied
doctors and psychologists at Nuremburg was simply to discover this difference. However,
according to Douglas Kelley – one of the psychiatrists who interviewed those accused –
“such personalities are not unique or insane [and] could be duplicated in any country of
the world today” (c.f. Harrower, 1976, p76).

Given the knowledge that was emerging in post-war Europe about the Nazi atrocities,
the expectation that these people were somehow different was an attractive one, and it
is unsurprising that Kelley et al‟s findings were largely kept from public consumption: “it
is more comforting to believe that no „normal‟ or „healthy‟ person would be able to
engage in such atrocities against humanity. It makes it easier for us to distance
ourselves from the Nazi atrocities by regarding all perpetrators as inherently evil,
psychopathic killers” (Waller, 2007, p 62). Indeed, Waller also highlights that Ruldoph
Hess, private secretary to Hitler and the third ranking Nazi official, preyed upon the idea
of the „Mad Nazi‟ in order to try and commute his punishment. By reading novels in court
during his trial hearing, imitating a mad stare, pretending to be unaware of the court
proceedings, and rocking back and forth whilst the verdict was read out, Waller argues
that Hess was feigning insanity - or at least incompetence to stand trial - and was
cynically trying to take advantage of the general perception that only „pathological‟
people could have implemented these atrocities. Hess was effectively exploiting lay
explanations and expectations of evil people to avoid a life sentence. Similarly, reports
that a post-mortem of Robert Ley‟s brain revealed “a long standing degenerative process
of the frontal lobes” confirmed “the wide-spread notion that the Nazi atrocities could be
relegated to abnormal, diagnosable conditions – even something as quantifiable as „brain
damage‟” (Waller, 2007, p 62). The fact that a later report suggested that his brain was
not as abnormal as these earlier reports indicated, slipped by largely unnoticed.

Our everyday assumptions about the SS Guards who engaged with the dirty work of the
concentration camps are also often compromised by the „banality of evil‟. Arendt, for
example, famously suggested that the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann was not a
monstrous figure, but a relatively tedious and banal one. Similarly, Lifton (1986, p 5)
carried out an extensive study of the medical doctors who worked at the concentration
camps and conceded “participation in mass murder need not require emotions as
extreme or demonic as would seem appropriate.”

Nils Christie‟s study of prison guards is also instructive. Dividing camp guards into two
groups, the first was composed of those who prisoners thought were bad and dangerous
and who were later prosecuted whilst the second, a control group, who were viewed
more favourably by prisoners and who were not prosecuted, Christie sought to compare
their characteristic differences using a number of tests. He found little to differentiate
the „bad‟ group from the control group. Whilst the dangerous guards were more likely to
view the prisoners as inhumane, less able to empathise with them, and were more likely
to be scared of them, he concluded: “other youths could have become like them if they
were in the same situation and exposed for the same pressure” (Christie, 1952, p 60).

More generally, Milgram‟s (1963) „shocking experiments‟ would later highlight the
susceptibility of any individual to act obediently to authority, and Asch‟s (1956) studies
of conformity would suggest the remarkable power of group sentiment in even the most
of banal situations. Zimbardo et al‟s (1973) equally infamous prison experiment at
Stanford would similarly demonstrate just how easily it is for people to act with
increasing brutality in an assumed role.

Such insights into the machinations of the holocaust have led some to make a rather
uncomfortable assertion. Evil is not something that other people do, it‟s something that
we all could do. As Darley concludes (1992, p 204): “[M]any evil actions are not the
volitional products of individual evildoers. Instead, they are in some sense societal
products, in which a complex series of social forces interact to cause individuals to
commit multiple acts of stunning evil”.

Darley goes on to highlight that it is organisations themselves that create and maintain
sustained evil – killing organisations produce those who are killed, and those that kill.
Therefore, it was the over-arching structure of Nazi concentration camps, and the wider
state, that required SS doctors and guards to select those that would enter the camp for
labour and those that would enter for death. This structure, as Darley points out, existed
whether any particular doctor or guard participated or not and, in a place where life was
extraordinarily tenuous, the option of not participating would have taken tremendous
courage. Therefore, the problem for many of the doctors and guards was not whether
they would participate, but how they would cope with rationalising the process. However,
as both Lifton and Darley highlight, once they had learned to cope with this situation,
some could then begin to operate with greater efficiency as the norms of the camp
began to take over the more established norms of wider society that they were used to
operating in. The camp effectively became a hermetically sealed micro-society that had
its own local moral framework that could be used to make sense of their actions and
even use it to assess and improve their work.

Indeed, whilst the brutal actions of the S.S. within various concentration camps remain
shocking for contemporary audiences, sociological approaches to deviance have long
demonstrated that “[d]eviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behaviour;
it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly
witness them” (Erikson, 1962, p 308). Deviance does not occur due to individual or
pathological malfunction, but is instead relative to the context within which an action or
actor is observed. Given that such barbaric conduct was an everyday occurrence within
the immediate confines of the camps, the actions of Grese and others were not deviant
in the context of the everyday habitus of the SS guards (see Sofsky, 1997). Perversely
perhaps, to not conform to the barbarity that Rudolf Hoss would later refer to as a „cult
of severity‟ and the „Dachau spirit‟, would have actually been more deviant for an SS
Guard within the confines of the camp.

Given the imposing modernistic administrative bureaucracy that had completely

rationalised and socialised Nazi ideology within the State, the reality of the individual to
choose to directly resist the wider Nazi regime must also have been very difficult.
Although much of the later academic discussion of Nazi women has oscillated between a
discussion of Nazi women being victims or perpetrators (see Schwarz, 2002, for
example), born in 1923 and just ten years old when the Nazi‟s came to power, Irma
Grese was fully socialised within the Nazi machine and, as Playfair and Sington (1957)
note, she would have had little choice about whether she would engage with the regime.
Despite her sister‟s suggestions that they had never been a part of the Nazi League of
German Maidens (the Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM), membership was made automatic
in 1936 and the romantic mythology of the countryside and those who worked upon the
Fatherland that was espoused in such meetings must have been an appealing vision for
an impressionable young farmer‟s daughter.
Similarly, her stint as an assistant nurse at Hohenlychen in the late 1930s, a special
hospital for the Waffen SS where decorated soldiers and other high-ranking Nazi leaders
stayed to recuperate, would have brought her within close proximity to some of the most
important men in Germany at that time. Heydrich, Hess, and Streicher are all reported to
have stayed there for „toning-up‟. Working under Professor Karl Gebhardt15, commonly
reported as being a school-friend of Himmler and an original participant in the Beer Hall
Putsch of 1923, the experience must have been a hugely influential one.

Beyond her early experiences of the Nazi State, Playfair and Sington also suggest that
within the confines of the concentration camp it is unlikely that it would ever have
occurred to Grese that she could disobey orders either. On top of her wider conditioning,
brutality was being institutionally reinforced. In her testimony she herself noted how she,
aged just twenty, had punished a disobedient colleague (Phillips, 1948, p 250). Similarly,
Herta Ehlert also related at the Belsen trial how she had been transferred from a camp in
Poland to Ravenbruck because she had been „too great familiarity with the prisoners, not
being severe enough with them‟ (p 227), and, as Playfair and Sington (1957) argue, to
be downgraded from wardress to prisoner was not so rare within the concentration
camps. It is unsurprising, therefore, that just like many of those charged with war crimes
who used a „cog-in-the-machine‟ defence, Grese also recognised the difficulty of resisting
the Nazi ideology, or the brutality within the camps. Inevitably, she did this more
candidly than most:

“I remember saying in the first statement I made to an English

[British] officer that "Himmler is responsible for all that has happened,
but I suppose I have as much guilt as all the others above me." I
meant by this that simply by being in the S.S, and seeing the crimes
committed on orders from those in authority and doing nothing to
protest or stop them being committed makes anybody in the S.S. as
guilty as anybody else. The crimes I refer to are the gassing of
persons at Auschwitz and the killing of thousands at Belsen by
starvation and disease. I consider the crime to be murder” (Phillips,
1948, p 712)

15
Gebhardt was later executed at Landsberg in 1948 for the human experiments he would go onto perform at
Hohenlychen.
But it is not only her apparent willingness to admit her guilt that is made to stand out
from the others present at Belsen and elsewhere. The Grese narrative is also one that
has become highly personalised, and highly individualised. As is often the case with
famous criminals, and far over and above other SS Guards at Belsen, much biographical
detail is typically presented in the narratives of her case that allows us to „see‟ her with
more focus. There has even been one biography (c.f. Brown, 1996). But regardless of its
inconclusivity, there does seem reason enough to mention her life pre-war in detail.
Indeed, unlike others present at the Belsen trial there is a whole section on her
„Background‟ in her Wikipedia entry. Her mother‟s suicide is a central point of reference
of (undefined) significance, as is her failure to become a nurse, which itself is often taken
to be evidence of her lack of education16. Despite the fact that the year of duty and the
RAD/wJ (see below) meant that many young German woman would find themselves in a
series of different employment contexts – just as the youth of today does – something is
made of Grese‟s inability to „hold down a job‟. Similarly, she is often portrayed as being
„bullied‟ by her class-mates, and was „fanatical‟ in her support for the Bund Deutscher
Madel, „League of German Girls‟.

In comparison, details of the lives of Bormann, Volkenrath and others are largely
anonymous pre-war. Whilst the biographical detail of any individual is likely to rise
exponentially according to their perceived infamy, the presence of an individualised
narrative does necessarily heighten the uniqueness of the biographee. The problem here,
however, that the ordinariness of her background is self-fulfilling and even amplifies her
extremely deviant identity. Because of her evil status, there is a collective expectation
that there is something equally pathological in her up-bringing. Although all sorts of
biographical details get caught up in an emerging deviancy amplification spiral – she is
deviant, therefore we will find other deviant things about her - when, somewhat
inevitably, nothing conclusive or particularly remarkable is found it transgresses our
expectations regarding explanations of deviance and is thereby more deviant as a result.
There is no easy explanation that can be clearly identified in her biography and this, in
turn, adds to her status as being evil.

16
A popular, if forgotten, explanation for the involvement of those implicated in the worst atrocities was that
they were, in part, un-educated. This narrative was strongly repeated within the explanation of Playfair and
Sington (1957).
However, although the Irma Grese narrative usually omits wider acknowledgement of the
complex role of women in the Third Reich, the image of Irma Grese as evil cannot be
understood without placing it within the wider gendered narratives of war-time Nazi
Germany. Whilst she is presented as something of a unique figure, she was certainly
was not alone in her complicity and there were many women in the SS Auxilliary service
and beyond who were engaging with the various structures of the regime.

Irma Grese and the ‘dirty work’ of Nazi Germany

Already well established within the Third Reich, the Pflichtjahr - the year of duty - was
made compulsory in 1938 and any un-married woman seeking work was obligated to
first complete a year of un-paid employment, usually as a farm-hand or in domestic
service. Similarly, by 1941 the Reichsarbeitsdient – weibliche Jugend (RAD/wJ) also co-
opted young women into a „Reich Labour Service for Female Youth‟ – something of an
equivalent to military service for men. With the entrenchment of hostilities on the
Western and Eastern fronts, and the drain on resources that thereby ensued, a further
requirement meant that the civic duties of single Aryan women would include an
additional six-month Auxiliary War Service (see Heineman, 2003). According to Schwarz
(p121-122), the result of these policies meant that Nazi women increasingly found
themselves involved in areas of crucial military support work, such as manning anti-
aircraft guns, or assisting with administrative requirements of the efforts on the front
line. By the time of the devastating Allied air-raids of 1944, married women were also
being heavily conscripted for the war effort and toward the cessation of hostilities some
even found themselves building anti-tank lines across the German boarders. Other
women were also directly involved in the forceful deportations of Jews from Poland, and
Schwartz (2002) and Koontz (1986) provide much evidence to that suggest that many
willingly relished the opportunity to contribute to the Fatherland in all areas of the
German wartime experience. Whilst this engagement could result in a civilian job with
the public transport service or as a nurse or worker in the local hospitals and factories,
for some it meant a direct engagement with the „dirty work‟ of the concentration camps17.

17
Heinke (2008) highlights that some of the SS Women, attracted by the relatively good wages, the promise of
welfare related work, and the offer employment in the public service, would have actually applied to work in
the labour camps, rather being referred by the labour exchange. She also highlights that applications were
common from those who had worked in domestic service and/or welfare settings, both of which applied to
Grese. It is unclear whether Grese actually applied or was referred, although in her own testimony Grese does
suggest: 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 Phillips, ,p .
Evertt C. Hughes defines „dirty work‟ as the work of a society that is either physically,
socially, or morally tainted: “It may be simply physically disgusting. It may be a symbol
of degradation, something that wounds one's dignity. Finally, it may be dirty work in that
it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions (Hughes, 1951:
319).” Hughes contends that the people who perform dirty work have the potential to
become stigmatised because they handle the work of a society that is distasteful and
disgusting to the rest. Although other members of society may applaud, simply
recognise, or ignore the contribution that the work gives to society, the presence of dirty
workers allows non-polluted members of society to go about their daily lives and
continue to regard themselves as „clean‟. To use Goffman‟s terminology, the dirty worker
is then always potentially socially discreditable by those who do not engage directly with
the work. In certain contexts this difference can lead to an irrevocably spoiled identity
for the dirty worker – an identity so stigmatised that it becomes the master status of the
individual concerned.

Whilst the business of war inevitably provides all sides with seemingly necessary dirty
work, the problem for the SS guards and the wider members of post-war Germany was
that when the camps were liberated and the habitus of the SS machine evaporated, the
values of a more normative humanity were re-imposed. In this new context, their
actions within the concentration camps were now radically deviant. Indeed, in the
immediate aftermath of the war this extreme deviance was continually being reinforced
by repeated revelations of the German atrocities – many of which were being relayed to
the German public via British Public Information films that were being shown to them
specifically to demonstrate what they had been a part of. The German populace was
irrevocably associated with a regime that was increasingly being labelled as evil.

As many Germans had been directly involved with the war effort, some onlookers, and
various other members of the Allied victors - not to mention some Germans themselves
- were asking difficult questions about their complicity. Indeed, as Evert Hughes himself
was later to ask: “How could such dirty work be done among and, in a sense, by the
millions of ordinary, civilized German people?...How and where could there be found in a
modern civilised country the several hundred thousand men and women capable of such
work?” (Hughes, 1951, p 25). With so many people potentially discreditable – and even
prosecutable - because of their involvement and complicity with the dirty work of the
Third Reich, the question for the German people as individuals and as a nation was how
to (re)present themselves as „clean‟ and avoid the stigma of the Nazi party.
Of course, the chaos of the after-math of the war provided many with the opportunity to
slip away into the rubble of post-war Germany. Given that much of the dirty work of the
Third Reich was conducted in secret, many had ample opportunity. Citing the work of
Kogon, Hughes suggests that „the Nazis came to power by creating a state within a state‟,
but „even as a movement, it had inner circles; each sworn to secrecy as against the next
outer one‟, and at the centre the SS, which went „beyond all danger of interference and
investigation‟ because „it was the instrument of interference and investigation‟ (1951, p
33). These concentric circles of secrecy and operation therefore, allowed the German
people and the Allied forces, who were both struggling to cope with the administrative
requirements of post-war Germany, to assume a position of what Coser (1969) terms
the „denial of visibility‟ with respect to many of those who carried out the dirty work: „as
long as such knowledge did not directly intrude on their perceptual field, the public
remained unconcerned‟ and all but the most visible faces of the regime were largely
unknown. Only the diligence and determination of so-called „Nazi-hunters‟, and a good
deal of serendipity, would result in some of them eventually being tracked down. At the
time, however, given the lack of visibility, and the fact that the SS and others
scrupulously destroyed evidence, which included witnesses, many of those „evil-doers‟
who had engaged with the dirty work could remain relatively anonymous. Heinke (2008)
estimates that criminal proceedings were initiated against just 10% of female guards,
with many never actually coming to trial because of the death of the accused, or the
„absence of proof‟: “the majority of a total of over 3,000 former guards received light
sentences or were not convicted at all. Most of them lived unmolested in the Federal
Republic of Germany” (p 137).

More generally, the „denial of visibility‟ that resulted from the chaos of post-war Germany
provided an opportunity for the wider populace of German women to revert from being
„Nazi women‟ back to their more maternal, and socially acceptable, roles. According to
Schwarz (2002, p 122):

“[the] „women in uniform‟ and the Nazi activists and party members,
„the perpetrators, followers and bystanders‟ had shucked off their
past and been transformed into innocent women, women whose
whole existence was devoted to loving their husbands and children
 and who had lived their lives in the private sphere of the family and
were not responsible for the dictatorship or Nazi crimes”

Like Koontz (1986) before her, Schwarz argues that those complicit with the Nazi system
were able to use their relative anonymity to collectively recast their memory as one of
sacrifice, suffering and exertion in the face of the absence of their men. The high-water
mark of which was the Trumerfrau – the „women of the rubble‟ who cleared away the
debris in the aftermath of the war that paved the way for the reconstruction of Germany.

Indeed, the Trumerfrau were institutionally required by the Allied powers to assist with
the clean-up, and were increasingly depicted in the public information films as „mending‟
and „nurturing‟ a broken Germany. Collectively forgetting their immediate past, it was
these women who were effectively engaged in the work of home-making, albeit on a
national scale, to re-build their defeated country.

It was undoubtedly effective and Hannah Adrent would comment on the apparent lack of
collective memory of the holocaust in all this re-building (1950, p 342):

“nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less
talked about than in Germany itself.... And the indifference with
which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the
absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they
react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of refugees in their midst....
The average German looks for the causes of the last war not in the
acts of the Nazi regime, but in the events that lead to the expulsion
of Adam and Eve from paradise. Such an escape from reality is also,
of course, an escape from responsibility”.

This collective ignorance allowed the identity of the „Nazi women‟ to mutate into a
relatively anonymous lump of maternal and nurturing Trumerfrau. However, these
images contrasted heavily with a group of „dirty workers‟ who were increasingly being
singled out for attention in the post-war public information films that were being shown
in the UK and Germany – the SS Women. As Weckel (2005, p 561) highlights,
 “Commentaries on films and captions for photographs were to guide
the viewers‟ interpretation, mostly assuring them that these people
might look ordinary but were indeed extraordinarily cruel and evil. To
arouse viewers‟ distrust in their often unspectacular appearances
seemed to be easier when the pictures showed female perpetrators.
The sight of them was relatively unusual and for many, unexpected”.

But not only did the representations of the SS Women in the immediate aftermath of the
war contrast with the Trumerfrau, they were also directly juxtaposed, and inexorably
linked, with the harrowing images of the liberation of Belsen. Weckel‟s is a particularly
evocative description of the horror:

“Some inmates on the verge of starvation are shown being helped to

walk a few stumbling steps, the camera recording their pitiful
movements. They have been stripped naked for demonstration
purposes, while the helpers supporting them remain clothed: a
situation that, however self-evident, intensifies an impression of the
survivors as objects entirely lacking in autonomy, unable to protest
treatment beyond their control. Their nakedness, however, reveals
more than catastrophic malnutrition. These bodies, to which the term
„walking skeletons‟ has often been applied, hardly show any
distinguishing characteristics: their heads have all been shaved; their
age cannot be estimated; their genitals are so withered that their sex
cannot be classified; their body gestures express only weakness;
their emaciation is far too pronounced to make out individual facial
features” (2005, p 554)

If the sight of a „living dead‟ were not shocking enough, the show-reels would also refuse
to look away from the actual dead too:

“the documentaries contain images of fields and mounds of corpses,

corpses in open mass graves and on trucks. Often it is quite
 impossible to make out which parts of the body belonged to which
contorted corpse. The takes regularly change between panning shots
to stress the huge number of corpses and medium close-ups that
show most of them as mutilated. Sometimes the camera captures
individuals in close-up, generally of the head, lingering briefly in a
„frozen image‟. Most of the dead bodies are naked, which is a
distressing sight per se since in most societies the deceased are
covered and their eyes closed as soon as possible” (2005, p 552)

It is of little surprise, therefore, that Belsen and the shocking images of bodies being
bull-dozed into „corpse pits‟ has etched itself into the collective memory, as one
commentary recently described it: „...the film footage taken at Belsen concentration
camp became so ingrained in British popular culture that it‟s name became a synonym
for the worst examples of Nazi inhumanity – a connotation that remains just as strong to
this day‟18.

Coser (1969, p 103) argues that a common technique of „othering‟ evil people is not only
to disallow them the denial of invisibility, but also to encourage a form a „publically
sanctioned seeing‟. Typically, this „othering‟ denies them a common humanity – those
that carry out the worst of the „dirty work‟ are not really like us and they do not share,
nor deserve, the sense of sympathy which we extend to people like „us‟. This was clearly
the case for the SS women who found themselves woven into the narratives that
accompanied the horrific images of Belsen. Alongside the anonymity of the German
populace generally and the growing images of the Trumerfrau, the SS Women were
clearly framed to be visibly deviant in the extreme – they were portrayed as:

“...women so wicked that they turned the gender order upside down.
Far from today‟s studies of „ordinary men‟, „ordinary women‟ and
„ordinary Germans‟, most contemporaries preferred to imagine the
executioners of such extraordinary crimes as themselves
extraordinary, hence categorically different from the rest of mankind.”
(Weckel, 2005, p560)

18
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml
This publically sanctioned seeing was quickly concentrated on those individual SS women
who had been singled out for prosecution in the immediate after-math of the war.
Indeed, by creating a group of identifiable outsiders, the Belsen and Nuremberg Trials
focussed the public gaze on a select band of dirty workers. Albert Pierrepoint summed up
the gravity of responsibility that he felt amongst all of this publically sanctioned seeing:
“Because of what people felt about Belsen, and because they saw me as, in a way, their
own stand-in avenger, not only for the wrongs of the SS but for all their grief at the
deaths in this long war” (1974, p 141).

However, not only did all this publically sanctioned seeing allow the ordinary civilians of
Britain and the rest of Europe an identifiable focus for their own frustrations, anger, and
grief, the trials also allowed the International community – who themselves had an
interest in justifying their own questionable actions in the war effort - to use the now
visibly identified, and increasingly vilified, individualised dirty workers.

Indeed, according to Douglas, the guiding purpose of the prosecution at the Nuremberg
Trials was to re-establish the normative rule of an impersonal and impartial law. Only this
attempt to re-civilise normative society could protect „progress‟ from a regression to an
atavistic primitive. In declaring and re-affirming the absolute requirement for impartiality
against the defendants, Douglas goes on to suggest that the prosecution highlighted that
the trials themselves had actually become a high water-mark for progress – a polar
opposite to the Nazi regime. No longer following the „hue-and-cry‟ of the localised masses,
and against the ideological doctrine of the National Socialists, international law would be
driven by standardised assertions of evidence, law and reason rather than „primitive‟
outcry or ideology.

Similarly, Playfair and Sington (1957) point out that the Belsen Trial, the first of its kind
in history, was „an astonishingly judicial one‟ (p 156) and only charged those against
which there was individual evidence. Over thirty of the eighty-eight camp guards who
were originally taken into custody were not brought to trial, and according to Playfair and
Sington „it is pretty certain that no SS man or woman innocent of cruelty was found
guilty‟ (p 158).
However Sington is hardly uncritical of the Belsen Trial or of the death sentence handed
to Grese. He goes onto to point out that up until April 1944, members of the armed
forces who violated the rules of warfare, but were acting under orders, would be immune
from punishment and could not be prosecuted. Yet this new regulation was applied
retrospectively to those at Belsen. Further, he points out that the it was a British Court
that sat in judgement on its defeated enemies, and who would apply their own particular
understandings of the Hague and Geneva Conventions to the accused, some of whom
were not members of the army and whose victims were other German Nationals. In short,
it was beyond the jurisdiction of a British Court.

Issues of jurisdiction aside, given the scale of the atrocities conducted by the Nazi regime
and the sheer numbers of people that were required to facilitate it, it is unsurprising that
the fledgling system of international law generally struggled to cope and the numbers of
those prosecuted for „war crimes‟ is likely to be a tiny fraction of those who were
complicit with them. At best, the fundamental base of individual culpability that under-
pins nationalised versions of criminal and moral law began to look increasingly tenuous,
and at worst, as Arendt (1963) would later suggest, it would represent the complete
failure of modernistic institutions to cope with the scale and gravity of the Nazi atrocities.

Indeed, whilst early (re)presentations of the SS Women were of a highly deviant group
within a highly deviant regime, Heinke (2008, p 136-137) argues that after the initial
prosecutions, there was a marked stereotyping of the SS Women in the later
prosecutions within the Federal Republic itself which seemed to play down of the guilt of
female concentration camp guards. This included the (gendered) assumptions that:
women had no real power within the camps; women were compelled to work within the
camps; that women did not have the character to act aggressively with the intention to
torture and kill; and were not naturally well equipped to cope with the pressures of the
concentration camp. The net implication was that over time there was a diminution of
individual responsibility and the SS women were less culpable than their male counter-
parts. Even after the establishment of the Central Office of Regional Administration of
Justice in 1958, which in part aimed to pursue Nazi prosecutions in a more systematic
and determined manner, the time-lag and difficulty of proof meant that many SS Women
were ultimately not brought before a court of law. Therefore, the resulting limited
number of SS Women who had been singled out by the gaze of an international court and
ultimately convicted for their crimes in the early aftermath of the war became the only
publically sanctioned prosecutions. As result, those prosecuted quickly became very
visual symbolic representations of extreme deviance within a wider narrative of an
extremely deviant regime.

Nazisploitation and the sexualisation of the SS

‘She-Devils’

Female concentration camp guards would not, however, disappear entirely from public
view. Whilst the public prosecutions of female concentration camp guards became more
and more anonymous and less newsworthy, the cultural image of SS women would
become more and more reified.

In 1955 „The House of Dolls‟, a novella written by „Ka-tzetnik 135633‟, was translated
from Hebrew and released in English for the first time. Presented in diary format, and
purportedly based on the real experiences of the writer‟s own sister, it tells the story of a
fourteen year old Polish woman who is captured and sent to „Camp Labor Via Joy‟ to
work in one of the concentration camp „Joy Divisions‟ – the so-called Lagerbordell. As a
forced prostitute, she would be subjected all manner of harrowing sexual and physical
degradations. Indeed, the novella describes the terror as the women work knowing that
their lives depend on the pleasure of their guests. The narrative is replete with Nazi
cruelty, including graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, medical experiments, merciless
beatings, and murder.

Whilst it was later revealed that Ka-tzetnik 135633 – in reality an author named Yehiel
De-Nur – did not have a younger sister, and the provenance of the narrative is highly
questionable, the novella was an international best-seller. Indeed, it provided a platform
for a series of exploitative cultural products that would construct and reify the deviant
sexuality of the female SS Guards.

In the early 1960s, the first of a series of pulp fiction „Stalag‟ magazines would emerge
shortly after the „Eichmann Trial‟ in Israel. Phenomenally popular between 1963 and
1965, they would purport to depict dramatic stories of captured British and US army
soldiers who were imprisoned within German Stalags. There they would encounter
formidable SS Women who would subject them to domination, torture, and sadistic sex.
Presented with lurid front-covers that depicted the „action‟ within, the titles of the
magazines would initially take numerical form. Later editions, however, would dramatise
the contents more explicitly and titles such as „Stalag of the Devils‟, „Stalag of the
Wolves‟, „Women‟s Stalag‟, „Death Stalag‟, and „I was a Stalag Commander‟ would prove
equally as popular. The back-covers would also hint at the contents inside. The sleeve of
„Stalag 217‟ promised, „„„a true and brutally honest story of the lives of male captives
bound by sadistic girls . . . women whose entire essence is based on the brimming lust
for the blood of others, for deriving sadistic pleasure from their pain, and for exploiting
the manhood of the captive at their mercy‟‟ (Pinchevski & Brand, 2007, p 389). The
narrative clearly depicted a „beautiful but deadly‟ character who has considerable
resonance with that of Irma Grese:

„Stalag 217 repeatedly contrasts Lilly‟s adolescent naïveté´ to her

mature cruelty as an avid Nazi: „„At first Lilly recoiled from
violence...[but] a strange transformation occurred in her once she
saw her friends whipping the screaming prisoners. She felt power,
strength, superiority. For the first time she felt herself identifying
completely with the idea of the master race” (cited in Pinchevski &
Brand, 2007, p, 395).

Indeed, the stories themselves clearly draw-upon, represent, and reinforce particular
aspects of the deviant sexuality of the camp and the guards themselves. Selectively
using images and motifs from the wider, and decadent, Nazi bricolage the magazines
construct sensationalistic composite narratives which rely on sexual deviance and
transgression to titillate. Conflating elements of assumed fact harvested from various
(problematic) historiographies, the stories are commodified and imagined constructions
of the past for the purposes of the (then) present. Indeed, Pinchevski and Brand (2007,
p 388) firmly locate the short-lived success of these magazines within the reception of
the Eichmann Trial by the Israeli youth, who were beginning to question both the
prevailing silence of the Holocaust, and the participation of the Jewish people within it.
For a generation of pubescent Israeli‟s, the “Stalags reveal a generation‟s simultaneous
initiation into adulthood, nationhood, and victimhood.”

It was not just young Israeli‟s who were being exposed to the increasingly sexualised
imagery of the concentration camps, however. By the early 1960s, men‟s adventure
magazines in the United States were also replete with similar fetishized Nazi imagery. In
magazines like, „Man‟s Story‟, „New Man‟, „Man‟s Action‟, and „Argosy‟ titillating tales of
captivity and torture at the hands of SS women would sit next to more general articles
on sex and nudity.

Figure 2: A lurid front cover of ‘Man’s Look’ Magazine

By the late 1960s, the advance of more readily available pornography curtailed the
popularity of „men‟s sweat magazines‟ and sales would decline. However, the images of
Nazi women that they also sustained and exaggerated within their pages would soon find
their expression in another form of popular culture - film.

Directed by Lee Frost and written and produced by Bob Cresse, both seasoned veterans
of the American sexploitation film industry, „Love Camp 7‟ would mark a new sub-genre
of the „women in prison‟ film and develop the motifs introduced by the earlier Stalag
pulps and sweat magazines. Infamous for sadistic scenes of rape, flagellation, drug-
taking, and murder, it tells the story of a special women‟s camp where prisoners are
used as sex slaves for officers of the Third Reich. Like most of the sexploitation films of
the time, the story is little more than an (albeit questionable) excuse to show female
flesh and „soft-core‟ sex. Preferring to concentrate on the female inmates the film does
not depict SS Women directly; it did, however, pave the way for a cycle of films that
would.

Indeed, whilst Frost and Cresse carried on making a variety of sexploitation films it was
another one of the original producers, David Friedman, who sought to cash-in on the
relative success of „Love Camp 7’. Released in 1974, „Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS‟ tells the
story of Ilsa, doctor and camp commandant of „Medical Camp 9‟. Theorising that women
are more resistant to pain than men and would, therefore, make better soldiers, Ilsa
spends much of the film attempting to prove her hypothesis by subjecting female
prisoners to a barrage of medical experiments. Interspersed within graphic scenes of
sexual violence, the plot also makes much of Ilsa‟s voracious sexual appetite. Primarily
as an excuse to show even more nudity and soft-core sex, Isla regularly selects male
prisoners to satisfy her insatiable lust – only to castrate or kill them when they fail to live
up to her requirements.

Mixing female nudity, sex, extreme torture, mutilation and even urolagnia with a paper-
thin plot, awful dialogue, wooden acting, inept cinematography, and – given the
exploitative content - at least one surreal attempt at cod-philosophical moralising, „Ilsa –
She-Wolf of the SS’ was a surprise hit on the drive-in and „Grindhouse‟ cinema circuit.
Despite her death at the end of the film, the success of the original would quickly mean
that she was resurrected to star in films such as „Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks‟
(1976), „Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia‟ (1977), and „Ilsa, the Wicked Warden‟ (1977).

Characterised by cycles of imitations and down-right „rip-offs‟ (c.f. Koven 2004), the
Italian film industry similarly moved to cash-in on the box-office success of Ilsa and a
number of similar films emerged in its wake. Reproducing the formula of the original Isla,
other Nazispoiltation films such as „The Gestapo’s Last Orgy’ (197719), „SS Experiment
Love Camp’ (1976), „SS Hell Camp’ (1976), „SS Girls’ (1976), and „SS Extermination
Love Camp’ (1976), would continue to blend questionable production values with
questionable content. Whilst not eclipsing the success of the original, these films were
again popular with „Grindhouse‟ audiences and remain cult films today 20 . Elsewhere,

19
The Gestapo s Last Orgy is also so e hat iza el also k o as Caligula reincarnated as Hitler .
20
In Britain, their infamy was cemented by their inclusion on the list of so- alled ideo asties . The
Gestapo s Last Orgy SS Experiment Love Camp SS Hell Camp and Love Camp 7 were effectively banned by
the Video ‘e o di gs A t, , a d o l SS Experiment Love Camp is legally available in the UK today.
more respectable „art-house‟ films such as Tinto Brass‟s „Salon Kitty‟ (1976) and Liliana
Cavileri‟s „The Night Porter‟ (1974) would similarly explore sexualised themes of Nazi
decadence, albeit in a less overtly exploitative manner.

By the end of the decade, the Italian film industry moved on and the sub-genre
appeared to have run its course. However, a number of Nazi-themed pornographic films
are still being produced today and in Quentin Tarentino‟s homage to exploitation cinema
„Grindhouse‟ (2007), one of the (fictional) trailers that plays as part of the film is titled
„Werewolf women of the SS’.

Whilst all of these films were by no means popular amongst mainstream audiences and
are still largely only known for their cult status, they do demonstrate how the cultural
image of the female SS guard had, by the 1970s, been reduced to sexual one. However,
whilst these films are necessarily all fiction, they are frequently presented as if they are
based on fact – as the title card that runs before „Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS‟ makes clear:

“The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The
atrocities shown were conducted as „medical experiments‟ in special
concentration camps throughout Hitler‟s Third Reich. Although these
crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters
depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the
events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic
purposes...We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous
crimes will never occur again. [Signed] Herman Traeger, producer.”

Evidently taking its cue from Ilsa Koch, the so-called „the bitch of Buchenwald‟, the
narrative then proceeds to combine a variety of motifs harvested from concentration
camp historiography, reducing the complexities and the tragedy of the concentration
camps to their most base and salacious form. As Koven (2004, p 85) suggests: “Again
and again, what we see in these Nazi sexploitation films are „composites‟ of historical
reality – Jewish doctors working in the camp infirmaries, specious medical
experimentation, sexual assaults on women prisoners – composites which „for dramatic
purposes‟, as the Ilsa title card reads, simplify the historiographic complexities of the
Third Reich”.
Whilst the later moral outrage against some of the Nazi sexploitation films was
unsurprising (c.f Kerekes and Slater, 2001), this process of combining and reducing
historiographic detail down to this base form is little different to any number of
encyclopaedia entries that describe Ilsa Koch or any other female SS guard.
Compressing the dynamic lived experiences of all those who lived and worked in the
concentration camps into a few lines of „historical‟ description or a ninety minute film
inevitably “reduces the complexities of a real person into its most sensational elements
in order to convey the extreme behaviours of those who ran the concentration camps”
(Koven, 2004, p 81). Whilst the producers and directors of Nazi Sexploitation did this for
their own specific purposes – indeed, in this sense some of the emergent subject
material was well suited to their needs - the cultural image of the SS women had clearly
been reduced into a simplified and dominant narrative that focussed upon the excessive
sexuality and excessive cruelty of the Nazi regime, but significantly of the women who
were given power within it.

These voyeuristic images of sexual monstrosity are hardly new to narratives of evil.
Indeed, Frankfurter (2006, p 84) highlights how themes of a dangerous but exciting
debauchery were common to American culture throughout the 20th Century. However,
whilst films like King Kong and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom depicted hapless
white women in savage, and usually erotic, rituals that served to warn of the dangers
that exist beyond the edge of the civilised world, the Nazisploitation genre and the
narratives of Grese transmute familiar themes of otherness by depicting female and
male victims in distinctly modernistic settings. Indeed, within these narratives normative
ideals of science, bureaucracy, gender, and the state are inverted to construct the evil
that threatens from within and at the border. However, the horror that this otherness
(re)produces is only comprehensible because we recognise what ideals are being
transgressed – to recognise the other, we must first be able to recognise the self. In
these terms the narratives of the „She-Devils‟ venerate and reify our expectations of
medicine, power, and crucially, our expectations of gender and sexuality.

‘The Beautiful Beast’: Images of an evil woman

Upon Grese‟s entrance at the Belsen trial, Sington and Playfair (1957, p 159) note that:
 “she was, by any standards, a pretty girl – the only one in the dock.
Her hair was blonde, with ringlets resting on neat shoulders. Her eyes
were clear blue under a high, broad forehead. She might have been a
handsome young nurse, a secretary, or even the head prefect of a
girls‟ school”.

Figure 3: ‘No. 9’ Irma Grese (centre) alongside Herta Elhert (left) and Ilse Lothe (right)

Similarly, the Daily Mirror would single out Grese in one report of the trial: “[A]n
attractive blonde who looks like a Hollywood film-star is one of the forty-eight accused in
the Belsen camp atrocity trial” (the Daily Mirror, 31-07-1945). Giselle Perl‟s initial
description of her appearance is even more flattering:

“She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her
body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic and her
blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine” (Perl,
1948, p 61).

She does, however, immediately juxtapose her physical beauty with her depravity:
 “And yet. Irma Greze [sic] was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative
sexual pervert I ever came across. She was the highest ranking SS
woman in Auschwitz and it was my bad luck to be under her eyes
during my entire camp life” (Perl, 1948, p 61).

Lengyel similarly makes much of Grese‟s aesthetic appearance in her autobiographical

account, this example is typical:

“...she was exceptionally beautiful. Her beauty was so effective that

even though her daily visits meant roll call and selections for the gas
chambers, the internees were completely entranced, gazing at her
and murmuring, „How beautiful she is!‟ Were a novelist to compose
such a scene, his readers would accuse him [sic] of the wildest
imagination” (1948, p 155).

She similarly reports that her clothes, some of them specifically tailored, were refined in
style and she spent “hours grooming herself before her mirror” so that her hair was
„faultlessly dressed‟. She also suggests that Grese sprayed herself with „tantalising
odours‟ selected from her „rare perfumes‟, some of which she „blended herself‟, and she
was not immodest with their use (p 155).

Observing her naked whilst Grese was changing, it apparently came as something of a
relief to Lengyel to observe that she was not aesthetically perfect:

“She was far from thin, but well formed; perhaps her breasts were a
little too large. Also she had thick legs. It was the first time I had
seen her without the SS boots. I was happy to observe that she had
an imperfection, she was so proud of her beauty” (p 197)

The contrary juxtaposition of beauty and brutal depravity, which is implicitly contained
within her popular moniker the „Beautiful Beast‟, is also a common theme in Lengyel‟s
elaborate accounts, for example:
 “Her immoderate use of perfume was perhaps the supreme
refinement of her cruelty. The internees, who had fallen to a state of
physical degradation, inhaled these fragrances joyfully. By contrast,
when she left us and the stale, sickening odour of burnt human flesh,
which covered the camp like a blanket, crept over us again the
atmosphere became even more unbearable. Yet our „angel‟ with the
golden tresses employed her beauty only to remind us of our terrible
position” (p155).

Clearly, this decadent refinery contrasts heavily with the horrors of the concentration
camp. At the same time, it specifically conforms to the all-too-familiar cliché of Nazi
decadence and the wider images of over-indulgence, opulence, and inherent greed and
corruption.

However, the Grese narrative is a particularly gendered version of this wider „decadent
Nazi‟ grand narrative. Unlike the stories of Nazi gold, rampant looting/burning of cultural
artefacts, over-blown neo-classical architecture, unrestrained scientific experimentation,
religious reinvention, obsessive symbolism, and ultimately the holocaust itself, this
particular realisation of decadence is clearly situated around a reoccurring triumvirate of
the female, the body, and sexuality.

The narrative trope of a sexualised feminine beauty that should be feared is one that is
common to some of the most enduring myths of evil women and the stories of Pandora,
the Sirens, Lillith, and even the witches of Salam and elsewhere, are replete with images
of dangerous women, sex, and the temptation of female flesh. Noddings (1989) argues
that the origin of the contemporary meta-image of the evil woman as „dangerous
sexualised excess‟ lies in the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western culture and, whilst the
religious over-tones may have dissipated, these narrative tropes clearly remain to this
day.

Indeed, Noddings argues that Judeo-Christian heritage has long held, albeit to varying
degrees, the sanctity of the spirit over the body. The spirit is the site of salvation and the
body a site for temptation and sin, very often in the form of sex. It is not surprising,
therefore, that some feminist writers have suggested that within patriarchal contexts
women, as objects of male sexual desire, have all-too-frequently served as scapegoats
for man‟s inability to control their own lustful transgressions. In these terms, the
feminine is the „devil‟s gateway‟ (c.f. Noddings 1989). Indeed, it was Eve that was
persuaded by the serpent to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and Eve who
subsequently tempted man: „Original sin‟ and the subsequent „fall of man‟ results from
Eve‟s initial denial of innocence.

Noddings goes on to propose that the institutionalisation of the normative „Eve‟ myth has
its roots in the religious plurality that early forms of Judaism existed within. Seeking to
establish itself in place of pagan and other religions that often emphasised, rather than
suppressed, the creative powers of female sexuality, the need to inhibit these tendencies
was clear: “A religion that recognised the creative powers of female sexuality was likely
to attract both women and men, albeit for different reasons. Therefore this religion had
to be stamped out, and all its accomplishments and manifestations had to be tabooed or
forbidden under sacred law” (Nodding, 1989, p 53). This also extended to the serpent
because these earlier pagan traditions had largely associated snakes with wisdom,
prophetic counsel, immortality, and fertility. Regularly being depicted together in ancient
relics, they were also special companions of women.

Therefore, when the Virgin Mary crushes a snake under her foot in the New Testament,
the act is also one that is loaded with the social and political symbolism of the time.
Building on the narrative of the „fall of man‟, Noddings highlights how the image appears
to call on Christian women to reject feminine values of those earlier traditions, as well as
effectively linking the serpent, and all that it previously represented, to an evil that needs
to be stamped out.

For Noddings, the contrast between Eve and Mary is also a striking one, and one that
strongly implied normative roles for both good and evil women. Indeed, in opposition to
the „tempter‟ Eve, Mary is both the obedient and dutiful mother. Significantly she is also
the mother to a virgin birth. An image which further reinforces the notion that virginity is
symbolic of the purity of the soul: it is Mary and the virgin birth that allows the son of
God, untainted by sin, to be born.
By the time of the Victorian era, Noddings argues that this idealised role of the „angel of
the house‟ had become so entrenched within Western culture, it was largely perceived to
the natural order of things. The model of a good woman was one in which women were
pregnant and pregnant again, yet pure and innocent:

“Good women are supposed to be filled with joy in their lives as

unselfish wives and mothers; they are to be angels – confined, of
course, to the house. Both Protestantism in its renewed appreciation
of marriage and motherhood and Catholicism in its reverence for
Mary as the virgin mother of God contributed to this set of
expectations for women” (Noddings, 1989, p 78).

By the time of WWII these idealised forms of gendered evil would be very clearly
reproduced and transgressed in the increasingly sexualised narrative of Grese. Indeed,
within the public domain the trial appeared to firmly establish the severance of her
relationship with her father and the Grese narrative commonly depicts her as wilfully
rejecting her home in favour of the Nazi party. Violently corrupting the passive „angel of
the house‟, Grese is clearly not limited to the domestic servitude.

However, this fore-grounding of her rejection of her family home within the narrative is
almost inevitably accompanied by some omissions. In addition to the fact that family
disagreements are by no means pathological, Grese continued to write letters to her
family after her conviction (see Brown, 1996). Similarly ignored is the presence of her
sister and brother at the trial (the Daily Mirror, 28-09-1945, The Daily Mirror, 17-11-
1945) – even though it is her sister‟s testimony that draws attention to her relationship
with her father.

Elsewhere, her presumed defiance at the trial and her lack of contrition in the face of her
over-whelming guilt is further evidence of her lack of maternal passivity. Upon hearing
the verdict at the Belsen trial, the Manchester Guardian (17-11-1945) would report
“Grese, hostile and scowling, was the only one to adopt an attitude that could be
described as defiant. The rest just stood up automatically, listened and sat down” (p 6).
Upon receiving the death sentence, Grese again stood out: “Kramer, Grese, and the
other two women sentenced to death showed no emotion, though Grese coloured slightly”
(the Observer, 18-11-1945, p1). Her defiance is still worthy of comment in contemporary
reports. One recent article in the Daily Mirror (21-11-2005, p16), that (re)produces the
standard narrative of Grese almost verbatim, suggests: “In a portrait never published
before, Irma Grese, the most notorious of Hitler's women, defiantly refuses to meet the
photographer's gaze” (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Shortly after her arrest, Irma Grese ‘defiantly’ refuses to meet the
photographer’s gaze

Similarly, on the evening before the hanging, Volkenrath, Borman and Grese are
variously described as singing Nazi hymns, Nazi anthems or German folk ballads. This
„rousing SS songfest‟ (Brown, 1996, p 86) is again usually interpreted as being in direct
21
defiance of the authority of the Allied courts.

This apparent lack of contrition and her repeated lack of care and kindness toward the
inmates within the standard reproduction of the narrative – and the pictures of Belsen -
contrast with the maternal image of the dutiful and compassionate carer: something that
is also implicitly reinforced by references to her failure to find gainful employment as a
nurse. At a time when abortion was highly contentious, the termination of her own child
at the hands of Perl similarly corrupts the assumed „natural order‟ of her gender. Clearly
inverting the „good mother‟ myth, the fact that the father of the aborted foetus is not
mentioned only adds to the implied (sexual) deviance – especially when combined with
vague stories concerning her alleged promiscuity.

Indeed, and not unlike like the Sirens and Pandora before her, sexual congress with
Grese – the „angel‟ with the pure face – would literally result in the ultimate punishment;
death. The camp gossip that also suggested affairs with Mengle and Kramer similarly
reinforce the corruptive influence of yielding to temptation and within these veritable
„matches made in hell‟, penetration and congress occur on a moral plane, as well as a
physical one.

Alongside the obvious corruption of the „angel of the house‟ and „good mother‟ myths,
parts of the Grese narrative also conform to those gendered ideals of evil that were
seemingly established in the Garden of Eden and the depictions of her during the trial
and after clearly emphasise her near angelic feminine beauty. Before her own testimony,
Major Cranfield, defending Grese, even asked the Luneberg Court to consider whether
her beauty was a guiding influence in the witness testimony. The Daily Mirror (17-10-
1945) reproduced the argument in one report: “Irma weeps, is she victim of jealous
women?” then adding “Did Belsen women hate Irma Grese and fasten on her at her trial,
because she is better looking than the other Belsen wardresses?” (p 18). However, this
apparent beauty is almost always immediately contrasted with her apparent bestiality.

21
It is worth noting that Playfair and Sington (1957), who appear to be the first authors to refer to the singing
merely describe it as: “An old camaraderie of defiance apparently possessed them. The warders say they sang
continuously till dawn” (p 183). It is notable it is notable that Pierrepoint omits it from his description of events
entirely.
For instance, the article goes on to suggest: “when she was asked if the whip would hurt
if it landed on anyone she answered pertly, „oh yes‟”. The repeated presence of the whip
further reinforces the association with eve – and the serpent.

In directly drawing attention to both the beautiful and the bestial, our collective
expectations of female beauty are clearly violated when confronted with the image of
Grese. Although Playfair and Sington are hardly alone in their opinion of Grese, their
commentary, for example, implicitly suggests that there is a collective expectation for
beautiful women to care for people; for them to take support roles to managers (men);
and that beautiful „girls‟ are the best, and most popular, people at school. The external
image of beauty is somehow representative of an inner being that is maternal, passive,
supportive and caring - all of which makes a woman popular. The „beautiful beast‟,
however, betrays these assumptions. Indeed, Grese‟s image transgresses deeply
embedded expectations about feminine gender roles within Western society - it is as if
society is surprised that such a beautiful girl could commit such atrocious acts to the
extent that there is a repeated need to draw attention to the discrepancy. Whilst the
images of the brutish Kramer, the embittered Bormann, and the boyish Volkenrath et al
have something of the unusual in their appearance that may offer (post-hoc) hints
towards their depravity, Grese does not immediately provoke „self-fulfilling‟ assumptions
about her appearance and her crimes.

Despite the fact that Lomrosso‟s caricatured idea that criminality is related to physical
features was long discredited even in 1945, Josef Kramer does conform to our
expectations of criminality – he looks evil, his brutishly masculine features tell us so:

Figure 2: Josef Kramer

As Weckel (2005, p 556) makes clear in her commentary on the news representations of
the liberation of Belsen:

“Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen-Belsen, is introduced

in the British Movietone News as „a thing called Kramer – you may
have seen his photograph in the papers‟, in part a reference to the
prototypically coarse, hence memorable, nature of Kramer‟s facial
features and to the brutal and dumb expression he had upon his
arrest.”

Grese, however, is „beautiful‟. But in not conforming to our collective expectations of

beauty, she immediately deviates from our assumptions about who is likely to be deviant
and what they look like. The image of Grese is constructed to violently transgress our
normative, and patriarchal, expectations of beauty and the feminine, and she is much
more visible as a result.

The symbolic image of a woman „out-of-place‟, which would also be culturally realised in
the „femme fatale‟ characters of the concurrent „film noir‟ genre, was one that had
particular resonance in the after-math of post-war Britain and elsewhere. WWII was a
war of attrition on both sides and the entrenchment of hostilities had depleted almost
whole generations of the male populations of both the Allied and Axis forces. Like the
German Reichsabeitsdient – weibliche Jugend and the Pflichtjahr, as a solution to the
increasing need to support the war effort on the „home front‟, British and American
women were increasingly required to take roles that had traditionally been the remit of
men. Areas of civilian and military industry that had previously been closed to women
now found themselves actively recruiting them.

However, the mobilisation of a female workforce in conjunction with the repeated

transportation of war-weary soldiers to and from the front also brought some not entirely
unexpected consequences. Whilst images within the propaganda of the Allied forces
glamorised the efforts of women on the home front, and in the process sometimes subtly
encouraged their sexual availability for the morale of returning service-men (see Hegarty,
1998), elsewhere the dangers of venereal disease to that war effort were also being
highlighted – and so-called promiscuous women were being labelled as a dangerous
enemy within. The problem for those looking to direct the war effort, therefore, was to
strike a balance between encouraging the sexual availability of women and limiting the
sexually pathological (see Hegarty, 1998). Indeed, in attempting to direct and control
women‟s sexuality, these campaigns effectively promoted a form of sexual independence
whilst simultaneously attempting to organize it. Whilst the individual experiences of
women in these newly realised roles differed (see Sheridan, 1990), when demobilisation
brought the returning soldiers home from the front and women were encouraged to go
back to the home, female sexuality could not simply revert back to the normative
assumptions held before the war. Indeed, whilst the liberating effects of the efforts of
women on the „home front‟ on future gender equality are still debated, the requirements
of the war meant that taken-for-granted expectations of gender with reference to work
and sexuality had become unmoored from their patriarchal foundations – women had
successful demonstrated that „women‟s work‟ was not limited to domestic servitude.

In these terms, the deeply sexualised image of Grese and the other SS „She-Devils‟ can
be seen as the reaction of a patriarchal society struggling to reconcile and control
traditional gender roles with the liberation that the war had brought both during and
after the conflict. So whilst Grese‟s apparently promiscuous sexuality and her gender-
defying position of employment and accompanying power was being portrayed as
extremely deviant it was hardly unique for the Second World War and was, in fact,
actually a symptomatic – albeit dramatic – facet of the conflict in both Allied and Axis
territories. Again, what was not deviant within the context of wartime became deviant in
the after-math of the war and the publically sanctioned castigation of her can be seen as
an attempt to restore and re-impose the normative patriarchal order of pre-war society –
to which her behaviour was extremely deviant, particularly so given her „beautiful‟
appearance.

Why was Irma Grese evil?

This discussion of the Irma Grese narrative is not an attempt to re-write history and it
does not introduce fresh evidence into the debate. Nor is it an attempt to provide
ammunition for holocaust revisionists who seek to glorify the image of Grese – indeed,
there is little doubt that Grese was guilty of the crimes she was tried for. Unlike other
disciplinary approaches to evil, I also have no interest in psychologically accounting for
her or her actions and neither do I attempt to reduce them to a largely unaccountable
nexus of biological and social forces. Instead, I ask the inter-related questions of how
Grese is remembered, and why she is remembered in this way. In short, I am asking
why we still remember her as evil.

At first glance she appears to be like any normal German woman of the period. Her
„background‟ portrays her as a relatively ordinary German girl and her early life
experiences are likely to have been similar to the vast majority of German women her
age. This is reinforced by the various photographs that have appeared over the years
that picture her as a well presented young and „beautiful‟ woman. On the other hand
however, are the grotesque images of Belsen – the product of a gross, purposeful and
determined negligence - and the stories of Grese‟s own rampaging sexual desires, which
are themselves symbolic of individual self-satisfaction and pleasure at the expense of
anything and anyone. Indeed, the Irma Grese narrative is not just symbolic of the
depravities of the Nazi regime, but one that goes beyond them. A narrative within a
narrative, her story is constructed to transgress our gendered expectations of the
atrocities of war and the extreme deviance of the Nazi regime and the SS in particular.
As a young, notably Arrayn, „beautiful‟ woman who was seemingly repeatedly capable of
extreme sexual aggression and extreme torture for her own sadistic pleasure in an
environment that came to stand-in as a collective vision for „hell-on-earth‟, she
symbolises extreme deviance and at the same time transgresses it. She deviates from
the „known‟ parameters of the extreme deviance she was part of, the SS guards and the
concentration camps, because she is a young „beautiful‟ and unrepentant woman.

Against our collectively imagined maternal and home-making expectations of women,

evidently „then‟ and „now‟, the image of Grese is, therefore, (re)presented to be one of a
sexually aggressive young woman who apparently chose to engage in acts of extremely
violent and sexual excess to the expense – and death - of others. Against the backdrop
of the SS women who were becoming increasingly anonymous, but also increasingly
sexualised, Irma Grese would even manage to stand out against those who were actually
singled out and prosecuted for their part in the Holocaust. Perceived to be deviant to a
group of extremely deviant women who were limited in number, and who were
themselves part of an extremely deviant regime, she has come to represent deviance
personified.
Having singled her out however, her image also becomes one that invites and requires
explanation. Indeed, unwilling to deny individual culpability for her actions, and, like the
experts who have tried to understand the engagement of the German public with the
atrocities of the Nazi regime, unable to explain them having admitted to her complicity,
she becomes a symbolic spectacle of the „known unknown‟ – a contrary symbol of
uncertainty in an age where rationalisation is paramount. The ordinariness of her
background and the lack of a readily accessible, and satisfactory, explanation for her
actions further serves to amplify her extremely deviant identity yet further as it
confounds our expectations of evil people and what causes them to be evil. Grese is not
mad, bad, devil or dupe – she is ordinary in every other respect. Therefore, she
transgresses our expectations of explanation and is thereby more deviant as a result – all
of which is more evidence of her status as an „icon of evil‟. A label that, in itself, serves
as a short-hand explanatory device to quickly allows us to cleave her from the rest of
normative society.

However, Irma Grese‟s image as a paragon of evil is more than a lack of an individual
explanation for her actions and a collective willingness to single out and remember one
„dirty worker‟ out of a cast of thousands. Indeed, in highlighting how the Grese narrative
constructs extreme deviance, and simultaneously transgresses it, we must further ask
„deviant from what? (c.f. Jenkins, 1998). In the context of post-war Europe, Grese also
seemingly contradicts our expectations about young „beautiful‟ – noticeably „- blonde‟
women in the modern age. However, in doing so, her story is one that also resonates
with and reproduces some of the most enduring images of evil women within Western
mythology. As a centre-point of what is now a firmly entrenched stereotype, Grese
represents a refashioning of „the Devil‟s gateway‟ myth of femininity. However, Grese is
not simply evil in the mould of Eve either – she is not necessarily just another tempter of
men. Instead, the Grese narrative is also one that warns of the dangers of a „woman out
of place‟. Indeed, by being by being seen to reject the home in favour of the state, and
occupying a position of power within that state system, the fact that she is very publically
convicted of abusing that power, Grese is clearly seen as a woman „out of place‟ – and
the consequences of deviating from being an „angel of the house‟ are there for all to see
in the lurid descriptions of her crimes, and in the collective memory of Belsen itself.
References

Arendt, H. (1950) „The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany.‟ Commentary
(October), pp 342-53.

Arendt, H. (1963) Eichman in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London:

Penguin Books.

Anonymous (1945) „Belsen Blonde.‟ The Daily Mirror, 31-07-1945, p 13.

Anonymous (1945) „Torture by No. 9‟, Newsweek, 01-10-1945, p42.

Anonymous (1945) „Irma weeps, is she victim of jealous women?‟ The Daily Mirror, 17-
10-1945, p 18.

Anonymous (1945) „Kramer and Grese among the Belsen guilty: How they heard their
verdicts.‟ The Manchester Guardian, 17-11-1945, p 6.

Anonymous (1945) „Belsen Trial: Eleven receive death sentence. The Observer, 18-11-
1945, p 1.

Anonymous (2010) „Evil women‟, in ‘The People’, 19-09-10.

Brown, D.P. (1996) The Beautiful Beast: The Life and Crimes of SS Aufseherin Irma
Grese. Ventura CA: Golden West Historical Publications.

Coser, L. (1969) „The visibility of evil‟, Journal of Social Issues, 25, 1, pp 101-110.

Darley, J.M. (1992) „Social organisation for the production of evil‟. Psychological Inquiry,
3, 2, pp 199-218.

Erikson, K.T. (1962) Notes on the sociology of deviance. Social Problems, 9, pp 307-314.

Ezard, J. (2005) „Beast of Belsen and his lover in Nuremberg exhibit.’ The Guardian, 21-
11-2005.

Frankfurter, D. (2006) Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic

Abuse in History. Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Glyn-Jones, R. (1996) The Giant Book of Killer Women. Sydney: The Book Company.

Harrower, M. (1976) „Were Hitler‟s henchmen mad?‟. Psychology Today, July, 1976.

Hegarty, M.E. (1998) Patriot or prostitute?: Sexual discourse, print media, and American
Women during World War II. Journal of Women’s History, 10, 2, pp 112-136.
Heinke, I. (2008) „Female Concentration Camp Guards as Perpetrators: Three Case
Studies‟, in, O. Jensen and C.C.W. Szejnman (eds.) Ordinary People as Mass Murderers:
Perpetrators in Contemporary Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heineman, E. D. (2003) What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital
Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kerekes, D. & Slater, D. (2001) See no evil: Banned films and video controversy. London:
Headpress.

Koontz, C. (1986) Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New
York: St Martin‟s Press.

Koven M.J. (2004) „The film you are about to see is based on documented fact: Italian
Nazi sexploitation cinema‟, in, Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema
since 1945, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds.), London: Wallflower.

Leitner, I. (1978) Fragments of Isabella: A memoir of Auschwitz. Crowell: New York.

Lengyel, O. (1995) Five Chimneys: A Woman's True Story of Auschwitz. New York:
Academy Chicago, Limited.

Lifton, R. J. (1986) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
Basic Books: London.

Milgram, S. (1963) „Behavioural study of obedience‟. Journal of Abnormal Social

Psychology, 67, pp 371/378.

Noddings, N. (1989) Women and Evil. Berkely: University of California Press.

Perl, G. (1948) I was a doctor in Auschwitz. International Universities Press: New York.

Phillips, R. (Ed.) (1949) The Trial of Joseph Kramer and Forty-Four Others: The Belsen
Trial. London: William Hodge.

Playfair, G. & Sington D. (1957) The offenders: the case against legal vengeance. New
York: Simon and Schuster

Pierrepoint, A. (1974) Executioner: Pierrepoint. Sevenoaks, Kent: Coronet..

Przyrembel, A. (2001) Transfixed by an image: Ilse Koch, the „Kommandeuse of

Buchenwald‟. German History, 19, 3, pp 369-399.

Raymond, C. (2005) „Nazi She-Devils‟. The Daily Mirror, 21-11-2005.

Schwarz, G. (2002) „During total war, we girls want to be where we can really
accomplish something‟, in O. Bartov, A. Grossman, and M. Nolan (eds.) Crimes of War:
Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century. New Press: New York, pp 121-137.

Sheridan, D. (ed) (1990) Wartime Women: a Mass Observation Anthology. London:

Heinemann.

Sofsky, I. (1997) The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

United Nations War Crimes Commission (1947) Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals.
Volume II: The Belsen Trial. London: HMSO.

Waller, J. (2007) Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weckel, U. (2005) Does gender matter? Filmic representations of the liberated Nazi
concentration camps. Gender and History, 17, 3, pp 538-566.

Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C. & Banks, W. C. (1973) „Interpersonal dynamics in a

simulated prison‟. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.