Irma Grese was 22 years old when a British Military Court at Lüneburg found her guilty, on November 16, 1945, of two war crimes. The first charge concerned the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany; the second, the camp at Auschwitz, in occupied Poland. In each case the charge said that she and others, as members of the staff responsible for the well-being of the people interned there, had "in violation of the laws and usages of war" been "together concerned as parties to the ill-treatment" of internees, causing the deaths of Allied nationals and physical suffering to others. The next day the court sentenced her to death. Her petition against the sentence was rejected, and she was executed at Hameln on December 13, 1945.
She had been one of 45 people in the dock in what became known as the Belsen trial, the case formally titled the Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 Others. It opened two months before the International Military Tribunal began at Nuremberg. Only six of the 45 were convicted on both counts. She was one of them.
Irma Grese was born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, in northern Germany, the daughter of an agricultural laborer. She finished elementary school in 1938, at 15, and over the next few years worked on a farm, in a shop and for about two years in a hospital.
In July 1942 she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and at 19 she became a camp guard there. Her defending officer later told the court that she had been conscripted into concentration camp service at 18. She was 19 by the time she was moved on.
In March 1943 she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In her own evidence at Lüneburg she described the work she was given there in roughly the order it came: telephone duty in the Block Leader's room, two days in charge of a punishment detail, work with another labor detail, and a spell censoring mail. She then became an overseer in Lager C at Birkenau. By the autumn of 1943 she held the post of Oberaufseherin, senior SS supervisor, which was the second-highest rank open to the women employed by the SS in the camps.
She stayed at Auschwitz until January 18, 1945. She went back to Ravensbrück, and in March 1945 she was sent to Bergen-Belsen.
She reached Bergen-Belsen in the middle of March 1945, arriving with two other women who would later stand trial with her. By then the camp was taking in new transports almost every day. In her testimony she described an overcrowded camp, with prisoners arriving dirty and ill, and roll calls held twice a week. She took over the post of Arbeitsdienstführerin and went out with working parties into the woods around the camp.
British forces entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, and Irma Grese was taken into custody at the camp that month. British military authorities began investigating at once. Investigators took statements from former prisoners and drew up affidavits for them to swear. While she was held, she herself made statements that were later put before the court as evidence.
The British prosecuted the case under the Royal Warrant of June 14, 1945, the instrument that set up military courts in the British zone for trying war crimes. The accused were 45 people in all: Kramer, members of the SS staff, women employed as overseers, and former prisoners who had held posts as functionaries in the camp.
The first charge read that at Bergen-Belsen, between October 1, 1942, and April 30, 1945, the accused, "when members of the staff of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp responsible for the well-being of the persons interned there, in violation of the laws and usages of war were together concerned as parties to the ill-treatment of certain of such persons causing the deaths of" named internees "and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown," and "physical suffering to other persons interned there." The dead named in it included Keith Meyer, Marcel Freson de Montigny, Maurice Van Eijnsbergen, Jan Markowski, Georgej Ferenz, Maurice Van Mevlenaar, Salvatore Verdura and Therese Klee.
The second charge followed the same form for Auschwitz over the same period, alleging ill-treatment by the staff there "causing the deaths of" Rachella Silberstein, "Allied nationals and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown," and physical suffering to others. Twelve of the accused were charged over Auschwitz, Irma Grese among them. One of the twelve faced that charge alone; every other accused answered the charge concerning Bergen-Belsen.
The wording mattered. The prosecution's case was that the deaths in both camps were intentional and that every accused bore responsibility as a working part of the system that produced them. The accused were not charged with individual acts as separate counts. They were charged as people who had been "together concerned as parties" to ill-treatment carried out in the camps, and the prosecution had to show both that the crime alleged had been committed by the staff and that each accused had taken part in it.
The court sat in Lüneburg, in a converted gymnasium. Its president was a British major-general, with four members, a brigadier, a colonel and two lieutenant-colonels, and a fifth officer sitting as a waiting member. A judge advocate advised the court on the law and had no vote. The prosecution was led by a British colonel, assisted by a major. The defense was conducted by eleven British officers and one Polish officer, experienced lawyers among them; a British Army major was assigned to defend Irma Grese, together with three other accused.
The trial opened on Monday, September 17, 1945. All 45 accused pleaded not guilty. More than 100 representatives of the press attended, in part because some of the accused were charged with crimes at Auschwitz, months before any court at Nuremberg would hear such evidence. The court sat for 54 days and heard more than a hundred witnesses, among them survivors of both camps and, as the first witness for the prosecution, a British Army doctor.
The rules of evidence were looser than in an ordinary British court. Regulation 8 of the Royal Warrant allowed the court to admit affidavits, documents, maps and films if they appeared to be authentic and to help prove the charge, and to leave their weight to the court. Affidavits from witnesses who were not called, films of Bergen-Belsen and of Auschwitz, and a map of the Belsen camp were all admitted. So were the statements Irma Grese had made in custody.
During the prosecution case the court heard how the affidavits had been taken. The officer in charge of the investigation described witnesses who struggled with the difference between what they had seen and what they had been told, and conceded that the dates in the affidavits were very unreliable. Witnesses had been shown photographs to identify members of the staff, some of them dummy photographs of people who were not believed to have been at Belsen. These points would return in the defense's closing speeches. Across the trial the defense took several lines: that the accused had acted on superior orders, which was the argument raised most often; that some accused admitted what had happened at Belsen but denied any personal part in it; that the survivors' memories could not be relied on; and that a British court had no right to try crimes committed against people who were not Allied nationals.
A Polish woman doctor identified Irma Grese in the courtroom. Eleven witnesses in all identified her. She gave evidence herself on the 26th and 27th days of the trial, Tuesday and Wednesday, October 16 and 17, 1945.
She took the court through her postings and duties at Auschwitz and Belsen. She admitted some of the disciplinary measures put to her at Auschwitz, which she said she had not been authorized to use, and denied the rest. She said the allegations of several named witnesses were untrue, that one account was, if true at all, "grossly exaggerated," and that one witness had never been in her section of the camp.
Two co-accused gave evidence that touched on her. One, who had served under her at both camps, contradicted one of the specific allegations against her. Another denied that the two had ever worked on the same detail.
The closing speech for Irma Grese and her three co-accused came on the 46th and 47th days, November 8 and 9, 1945. Her defending officer attacked the charge itself first. It was too vague, he argued, because it named Allied nationals who had not been shown to have died at Belsen; some of the people named were Hungarian, and so not Allied nationals at all, and the death certificates for others gave natural causes or dates before his clients had arrived. There had been no proper preliminary investigation, he said, and affidavits should be accepted only to support evidence given in court, never as proof on their own.
He then went through the evidence against her. One witness's account was vague. Another's story had been told for the first time on re-examination and did not appear in her affidavit. A third had given an account in court that did not match her sworn statement. Of the eleven witnesses who had identified Irma Grese, five had made no allegation against her, which he said cut against the picture of her the prosecution had drawn. The allegations of killing against her were uncorroborated.
On Bergen-Belsen, he argued that she and the two other accused had arrived in mid-March 1945, when the camp was already in chaos, with disease spreading and transport broken down. They had held limited posts connected with working parties, and the conditions of March and April 1945 were beyond anyone's power to correct and could not be laid at their door. He described his client as "one Overseer aged 21," a junior figure, and he questioned whether an overseer could give orders to the SS guards at all. He also argued that the Royal Warrant changed only the rules for admitting evidence; it did not lighten the prosecution's burden of proving that the accused had acted together.
The prosecutor's review of the evidence against each accused described Irma Grese as "quite frank" in answering most of the allegations. On her own admission alone, he submitted, there was ample evidence of ill-treatment of internees at Auschwitz, and he relied on witness evidence for further acts at both camps.
The judge advocate summed up over the 51st to 53rd days, November 14 to 16. The court had two questions, he said. The first was whether the crime set out in the charge had been committed by the staff of the camp. The second, which he called "the difficult issue," was whether each accused had been proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, to have taken part in it. Mere membership of the staff was not enough. The court had to be satisfied that a person was "deliberately committing a war crime, identifying themselves with the system in force at the camp."
On superior orders he directed the court to the standard text on international law, under which a war crime committed on orders "does not, in principle, confer upon the perpetrator immunity from punishment," because members of the armed forces "are bound to obey legal orders only." Orders could still be weighed in mitigation. He called the affidavits "dangerous material" and told the court it would find it difficult to act on the evidence of one or two witnesses unless it was supported in some material particular. Where a witness's evidence in court differed from her affidavit, the court should weigh that, and where it was in doubt it should reject the allegation.
He told the members that there was a tremendous volume of evidence on which they could properly find that the offense alleged had been committed by the staff at Belsen, and a tremendous body of evidence on the conduct of the staff at Auschwitz. The strongest case, he said, would be against Kramer, and it would run from him down the list of accused according to the positions they held. The prosecution did not have to prove every particular of a charge, only its substance.
He also told the court that it did not have to be sure of the death of any named person in order to convict, if it found that substantial ill-treatment causing death had been proved against people whose names the prosecution could not give.
The court gave its findings on November 16, 1945. It found Irma Grese guilty on both charges. Five other accused were convicted on both counts: Josef Kramer, Fritz Klein, Peter Weingartner, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Hilde Lobauer.
The court did not convict on the charges exactly as drawn. It ruled that, in the findings of guilty on the Belsen charge, the names of two Hungarian nationals and two Polish nationals would be omitted, together with the words naming one female internee among those who had suffered. In the findings on the Auschwitz charge, the words naming two Polish nationals among those who had suffered were struck out. The findings as they stood therefore referred to ill-treatment causing the deaths of Allied nationals at each camp, those named in the charge who remained in it and others whose names were unknown.
The next day, Saturday, November 17, the court heard pleas in mitigation. Her defending officer told the court that she was poorly educated, that she had been exposed to Nazi propaganda, that she had been conscripted into camp service at 18 and that she had been only 19 when she arrived at Auschwitz.
Subject to confirmation by superior military authority, the court then passed its sentences. Irma Grese was sentenced to death. Ten other accused received the same sentence: Kramer, Klein, Weingartner, Franz Hoessler, Karl Francioh, Ansgar Pichen, Franz Stofel, Wilhelm Dorr, Juana Borman and Volkenrath. Erich Zoddel was sentenced to imprisonment for life, one of nineteen accused who received prison terms. Fourteen were acquitted, and one had been removed from the trial through illness.
There was no appeal from a military court of this kind to a higher court. A convicted accused could petition the confirming officer against the finding or the sentence, and a finding stood unless it showed a substantial miscarriage of justice. Within days the British officers who had defended the condemned sent petitions for clemency to the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Germany. Irma Grese's was among them.
On December 8, 1945, the Commander-in-Chief rejected the petitions of Irma Grese, Josef Kramer and six others. Three of the condemned had not petitioned. The sentences were confirmed by superior military authority and were carried into effect.
Irma Grese was executed at Hameln on December 13, 1945, together with the ten others sentenced to death with her. She was 22.
The Belsen court drew its authority from the Royal Warrant of June 14, 1945, and from nothing broader. The Warrant allowed the prosecution of violations of the laws and usages of war. Its definition of a war crime was narrower than the Nuremberg Charter's, and it did not reach crimes against humanity, which the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg covered; the Bergen-Belsen defendants were charged only with war crimes. That limit shaped the charges against Irma Grese: they were drawn around the ill-treatment of Allied nationals, and when the evidence showed that some of the people named were Hungarian, the court struck those names from its findings rather than convict on them.
The Warrant also shaped the trial itself. Its Regulation 8 relaxed the ordinary rules of evidence, which is why sworn statements from absent witnesses and her own custody statements could be read in court, and why the judge advocate spent so much of his summing up warning the court about their weight. The court's membership was British, without officers from the many Allied nations whose citizens had been held in the camps; observers from several countries attended instead. The judge advocate advised on law but did not vote. In place of an appeal, the Warrant provided for petitions to the confirming officer, and no sentence could be carried out until that officer had confirmed it. Irma Grese's case went through each of these steps between September and December 1945.
Irma Grese pleaded not guilty and denied most of the specific acts that prosecution witnesses attributed to her. Her defending officer argued that the identifications of her were weakened by the use of photographs, by inconsistencies between affidavits and testimony and by the absence of corroboration, and that the allegations of killing made against her were uncorroborated. The court did not find that any particular named internee had died at her hands. Its findings were on the charges as amended, which alleged ill-treatment by the staff, acting together, causing the deaths of Allied nationals, some named and others unknown. The judge advocate had directed that a conviction did not require the court to be sure of the death of any named person.
October 7, 1923: Irma Grese is born in Wrechen.
1938: She leaves elementary school at 15.
July 1942: She is sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
March 1943: She is transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Autumn 1943: She becomes Oberaufseherin (senior SS supervisor) in Lager C.
January 18, 1945: She leaves Auschwitz and returns to Ravensbrück.
March 1945: She is transferred to Bergen-Belsen.
April 15, 1945: British forces enter Bergen-Belsen; she is taken into custody.
June 14, 1945: The Royal Warrant setting up British military courts for war crimes is issued.
September 17, 1945: The Belsen trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others opens at Lüneburg; all accused plead not guilty.
October 16 and 17, 1945: She gives evidence.
November 8 and 9, 1945: Her defending officer's closing speech.
November 16, 1945: The court finds her guilty on both charges.
November 17, 1945: She is sentenced to death, subject to confirmation.
December 8, 1945: Her petition is rejected and the sentence confirmed.
December 13, 1945: She is executed at Hameln.