The “Angel” of Auschwitz: A beautiful and sinister young woman who tortured and killed women and children with her bare hands

She was nicknamed “The Angel”, especially because her appearance confirmed it within the canons of Aryan beauty that dominated Nazi Germany: tall, blonde, with white skin and light eyes, a harmonious face and a rich body, almost the epitome of an “Aryan race”.

Perhaps that is why, of all the images of death in the living room, Death sentences morning December 13, 1945That is the body Irma Greece Hanging from the rope was quite a shock. Especially considering he was only 22 when his neck was broken.

When offered to say his last words, he chose what sounded like a command to British executioner Albert Pierpoint.

“Hurry up!” said.

That’s because “Angel” isn’t the full name of Irma Greiss, who the media called “The Angel of Auschwitz” for her collaboration with the incident. Joseph MengeleBut sexually abuses and tortures women and children with his own hands or with his whip, often to the point of killing them.

That is why it is also called “”.Beauty is the beast” or “The Pitch of Belsen”, for another extermination camp she was assigned to.

“She has been described as the worst woman in the entire department. There was no cruelty unrelated to her. She regularly participated in selections for the gas chamber, and tortured at will. At Belsen, she continued the same behavior, equally publicly. His specialty is launching dogs against defenseless humans.“, is described in one of the minutes of the Bergen-Belsen trial, in which he sat in the dock as supervisor of the Auschwitz, Bergen and Ravensbrück concentration camps.

Allied judges sentenced her to death for these crimes.

Irma Greece is a perfect example of what a monstrous destruction machine set up by the Nazis can do with its own human gears.

Irma Ilse Ida was born in a small town in Greece Resen On October 7, 1923, within a working family, it was soon destroyed Her mother’s suicide, When she was 13 years old.

His father, Alfred Gries, was a dairyman and for a time, very early on, he sympathized. Nazi Party, He quickly turned away from it, frightened by a frenzy he didn’t share. Irma grew up in that environment, and hearing anything from the Nazis certainly wasn’t flattering.

Being the eldest of four siblings, her mother’s death forced her to take care of them, and to find a job to supplement the meager family income. At first he helped his father in milk delivery, then he worked on a farm and then got a job as a cleaner in a hospital.

Under these conditions, Irma Gries was only able to complete her primary studies at the age of 15, at which time she got a job at Hohenlissen Hospital. There, seeing doctors and assistants, she decided to become a nurse, but they rejected her because she lacked the necessary training.

The hospital director, Carl Gebhardt, asked not to be discouraged and to prepare to try again later. While I was doing that, I could offer her a better job with a better salary than a cleaning lady Deputy SS.

Gebart had the connections necessary to successfully recommend her: he was already doing so at the time Surgical tests In a concentration camp, at the end of World War II, he got a trial at Nuremberg.

His first target Ravensbrück concentration camp Auxiliary to the Female SS Corps. This earned her her father to kick her out of the house when she was spotted wearing the uniform of the organization headed by Heinrich Himmler.

Those two events changed his life.

Since then, Ravensbrook has been the home and school of Irma Greiss. At first he had almost nothing to do with it 20,000 prisoners As they were assigned to administrative duties, the barracks were packed.

At the same time, he was trained to become a concentration camp supervisor, along with other assistants. Among her companions were other SS women who were later tried for their crimes, such as Ilse Koch, Heidelberg Neumann, Dorothea Binns and Maria Mandel.

Irma is the youngest of all. has 19 years And, at the end of the training, they send her away Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration campIn Poland.

There he was a supervisor of prisoners and met Josef Mengele, who helped select prisoners for cruel experiments that he described as “scientific” and that he rejected and sent to the gas chambers.

At the hearing, Greece will try to minimize its role. “The prisoners must form five. It is my duty to do so. Then, Dr. Mengele came and made the selection,” he announced, but was contradicted by dozens of testimonies from survivors.

Witnesses reported that “The Angel of Auschwitz” walked through the pavilions “in his impeccable uniform, his carefully styled blond hair, heavy and shiny high boots, a whip and a pistol.” Along with her dogs during her travels, always hungry and angry, Irma used them at will. One of their amusements was to hurl these beasts against the prisoners, so that they might be devoured.”.

After raping women, he also took to the practice of torturing and murdering them with a pressed whip.

“She punched him in the face and when the woman fell to the ground, she sat on her. “His face turned blue…” the survivor recounted.

Those who did not die from the blows were shot.

Accounts of the actions of “Beast of Beauty” in the three concentration camps she oversaw, a cold, sad woman who delights in inflicting suffering with her own hands.

“During her examinations, the blonde angel used her whip at will on all parts of our bodies. Our pain and the blood we lost made her smile with her perfect pearly teeth. In time she added other trials: setting hungry dogs on us so they would eat us, torturing children. did,” says a prisoner’s diary found by an Allied soldier in Belsen.

“He went so far as to gouge out a woman’s eyes when he saw her talking to an acquaintance through a barbed wire fence,” a survivor said during the trial.

In testimony at the trial, a Jewish gynecologist, a former prisoner, said, “Irma Greiss liked to beat the breasts of very talented and young women with her whip, so that the wounds were inflicted, and then she forced me to cut them off … without anesthesia! Likewise, forcing them to have sex with her. , fed up, killed them with her gun and sent them to the incinerators. “She was the only woman authorized to bear arms.”

Calculated from these stories as merciless Irma killed an average of thirty prisoners a day during her stay at Belsen.

He also collected the alms of his abominations. After the fall of Bergen-Belsen, the Allies captured her, and a review of the house assigned to her in the concentration camp was carried out. There were different screens Light bulbs made of human skin: She created them herself after skinning the prisoners she killed.

Unlike many SS assigned to concentration camps, Irma Greece He did not flee when he saw the advance of the Allies.

In the early morning hours of April 14-15, 1945, Berger-Belsen’s commander Joseph Kramer negotiated a surrender with the British while “El Angel” and other members of the SS went. Watchtowers Shoot the prisoners who try to escape because they are afraid that the Germans will kill them before they surrender the camp.

After that bloody night, photographs taken by the British when they captured the facilities the next morning show a long line of SS members in their neat and tidy uniforms. Among them, Greece stands out A cold and negative look.

Another photo, taken on April 17, shows the Greece commander standing near Kramer in a resting position, somewhere in the distance.

These images contrast with the horrors the British saw inside the palace: The corpses piled up Hundreds of prisoners.

During the trial, Greece showed no remorse. She was usually indifferent or distracted, doodling in a notebook.

Throughout the process, he never admitted a crime; Nor did he abandon his Nazi ideology. He simply remained silent or spoke as little as possible. Each time she was questioned, she answered in short, cold sentences as if she were not involved in the matter: “I don’t know” or “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

On the 54th day of the trial, the court found him guilty of war crimes in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camps.

He showed no emotion at that moment and when he heard the sentence: Death by hanging.

Locked in his cell the night before his execution, he repeatedly sang the lines of the SS hymn “SS Marchiert in Feindesland”, popularly known as the “Devil’s March”.

After that, he didn’t say a word, but with the noose around his neck, he addressed the English executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, as if in a command:

“Faster!”.