Episode 29: Hyena of Auschwitz: Irma Grese

Meet Irma Grese. She likes boys, girls, movies, makeup, and sadistic torture. She hates her dad, but loves Adolf Hitler. This is horrific story of the story of how propaganda—and a large dose of teenage boredom—transformed an unskilled peasant girl into one of the Holocaust’s most successful concentration camp guards.

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Sources:

The Beautiful Beast: The Life & Crimes of SS-Aufseherin Irma Grese, by Daniel Patrick Brown

“The Violence of Female Guards in Nazi Concentration Camps (1939-1945): Reflections on the Dynamics and Logics of Power,” by Elissa Mailänder in SciencesPo

“Nazi Bride Schools: ‘These girls were the nucleus of the Reich,’” Telegraph, 16 August 2013

“Auschwitz II-Birkenau,” from Auschwitz.org

“Life for young people in Nazi Germany,” BBC Bitesize, accessed 6/31/2019

“Gendering the Holocaust: A case study of Irma Grese: Constructing the ‘evil’ and the ‘ordinary’ through digital oral testimonies and written trial testimonies of the Holocaust survivors,” by Bianka Vida, Kaleidoscope

Music:

“Guilty” by Richard A. Whiting, Harry Akst, and Gus Kahn, sung by Anna Telfer

“Shake It and Break It” by Lanin's Southern Serenaders, licensed under a Public Domain / Sound Recording Common Law Protection License

“Death Is Our Only God” by Silent Carrion, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.