IRMA GRESE—Becoming The Hyena of Auschwitz-Judith A. Yates

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
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(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening. Irma Grasa, the Hyena of Auschwitz, entered Adolf
Hitler's concentration camps at the age of eighteen as one
of the most feared females in Nazi Germany. Before she
was twenty years old, Gresa became legendary for her insatiable
cruelty and sal liaisons. An alleged predator and sadist, even

(01:05):
Nazi supervisors were forced to curtail her brutal behavior. Irma
Gresa hailed from a small farming village. Her life's goal
was to become a nurse. Instead, she was a female
guard in the most notorious concentration camps of the Third Reich.
As World War II raged, so did Irma Gres's behavior.

(01:30):
When arrested and imprisoned, she continued to be defiant to
the last seconds of her life. At age twenty two.
No media has captured the complete true story of Irma Greza.
Too many documents contained regurgitated, unreferenced information. Numerous myths and

(01:50):
fallacies exists about the fascinating and terrifying Irma Greza until now.
The book that were featuring this evening is Irma Gresa
Becoming the Hyena of Auschwitz, with my special guest, investigative
journalist and author Judith A.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yates.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much
for this interview. Judith A.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yates.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yes, sir, thank you so much and congratulations, thank you
Irma Greza Becoming the Hyena of Auschwitz. Let's talk about
the origins of this book. Who was the catalyst for
this tell us about the origins of this incredible book project.

Speaker 4 (02:40):
Well, I was teaching of director of criminal justice program
in a college and I was teaching history of criminal justice.
History can be a dry subject to teach, So what
I would do is I would bring in re enactors
from different time periods talk about law enforcement during your
time and during the war World War two time period.

(03:03):
I called a local Jewish center in Nashville and asked
for a speaker, and that's how I met Esther litwyn
Loebe and Esther kame spoke to my class. It was
one of the most powerful presentations I've ever seen. She
and I became close friends and we talked about everything.

(03:24):
We talked about discrimination and how it starts. She can
remember when she was a little girl, how she was
teased so badly on the playground for being Jewish, and
then we would talk about you know, she gave me
great advice on how to meet a man in a
grocery store. But we talked and we laughed, and she

(03:49):
said once that she was never going to stop presenting
because it was important for people to never forget. And
my being a criminologist, I said, and we have to
learn how it happened to even prevent getting there. So

(04:10):
we did a lot of talking and being an expert
in female crime, I gravitated toward the story of Irma
Greza because she was probably the most known female perpetrator
in the camps and kind of put it off to
the side, but Esther gave me the willpower to dive
into the story, and it's also a tribute to her.

(04:34):
She passed away on my birthday and it still rocks me.
Get very emotional talking about it, but it rocks me
to the core to lose her. She's this little, tiny,
tiny lady that's traveling all over speaking about her experience
in a work camp in Siberia. I thought her story

(04:55):
needs to continue and people have to know the truth
of what happened to understand how to prevent it. So
that's sort of what kickstarted me off.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
You write initially, this book is the closest existing biography
of irmitc. Greza and the environment that did shape her.
And you say though that you understand what shaped her,
you have to understand why Nazism succeeded. And when we
talk about Nazism succeeding, you talk about the environment in

(05:30):
which Irma Gresa grew up in. And at the time
that Hitler took power, she was nine or ten years old.
So tell us about hitler youth and first off, tell
us about her background growing up.

Speaker 4 (05:46):
Well, there are several dates as far as her actual
birth date, but we do know that she was born
in nineteen twenty three. Now that was three years into
Hitler creating the Nazi Party in nineteen twenty and then
as she is school aged, they had the creation of
the National Socialist Teacher League, and that's when they started

(06:10):
putting Nazi ideations in classrooms. Every classroom started with Haler
Hitler ended with hal Hitler. There were posters on the
walls of Hitler as a white knight in shining armor.
There were little songs that included lyrics like Hitler is
our God. They had books called like the Poisonous Mushroom

(06:33):
about the evils of Jews, and so she grew up
entrenched in this ideology in school. Now, I do need
to say Dan Nazism did not create Irma Graza, nor
did Nazism create the evil people that came from it,

(06:53):
but it did play a role. Like everything else. You
can't blame one thing on being a criminal or being
a state serial killer overall bad person. There are a
factor of things.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Tell us about her family life and her father Albert,
and her mother Bertha, and then the conditions that she
was under in her own family at that same time.

Speaker 4 (07:18):
Well, you know, Nazism didn't necessarily mean to the people
at that time the annihilation of groups of people. It
was a new ideal and it focused on farming and agriculture.
Arma's father did work in agriculture, they were from a
very tiny town of one hundred and something people called

(07:41):
recon and he did not buy into the ideology. However,
it assisted him in many things. So he joins the
Nazi Party solely for that reason. There are benefits to
be had, and him as a farmer, there are certain benefits.

(08:02):
He also becomes a block leader, and it's very difficult
because so much of her her childhood is sketchy, and
what was going on in Frenklin at that time was
difficult to look into. But nonetheless he's the block leader,
and she surely saw that and his uniform and what

(08:26):
he had to do as a block leader. So you know,
you go to school and you're entrenched in this. You
go home and you're entrenched in this. Now her mother,
when Irma is very young, discovers that Albert her husband.
I am all over the place, discovers her husband has
been unfaithful, is the story. So she drinks poison, yes,

(08:53):
and first she tells the children to clean the house
just spickens fan and then sends them to their father
who is in the local pub. And when they all
come back, they find her dying on the bed, try

(09:13):
to get her help and she succumbs to drinking the poison.
So here she is at a young age and her
mother has committed suicide literally in front of her and
her family. Depending on who you talk to, her father
was either very very strict and beat the children for

(09:35):
any infraction, or he was a strong family man with
family values. It's kind of all over the place with
his personality, but you get the idea that it is Germany.
It is during that time period. It is a very
small town, and for example, the sister would later say,

(09:56):
we ate turnips as a treat a turnips as candy
per se. So she's growing up in this environment that's
very tough, very earthy, agricultural driven, going to school singing
these little songs and learning about there's a way out

(10:16):
of here. Then her mother has killed herself in front.
So she's had this tough childhood. There were good times
in between, but she's had this rather rough rural childhood
as a start.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Now you're right for a start. As a child, she
attends by that time a Nazi school belongs to a
youth organization allowed only to see Nazi propaganda films, which
it had replaced all media completely and it was officially
denouncing Jews as undesirables.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
Yes, they had to have. Every bad group has to
have someone to blame. Every group has to have somebody
to blame. So obviously, because of history, Jewish people are
blamed for World War One and all that they suffered
throughout that war and everything that happened afterwards. So that's

(11:16):
who they focused on. And as a little kid, you're learning,
this is the bad guy, but you're the good guy.
You're the great guy. You're the one who's going to
save this country.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
You talk about Hitler and you say that Nazism would
have lost all its power to integrate without him. And
so what we talk about is the youth groups that
he organizes. The boys at ten years old, and the
girls can join organizations at that age as well. Then
it moves up at fourteen to seventeen, and then another

(11:50):
organization from seventeen to twenty one. You write that Irmer
and her sister were anxious to join these organizations. Why
do you think, what do you think that the or
what do you say these organizations represented to these young girls.

Speaker 4 (12:06):
Well, when you're looking at the band of German maidens,
you're looking at a group that in a lot of ways.
Today's girl Scouts. They get to camp and sing songs.
They're wearing a uniform, they're marching, they're helping their country. Later,
when beating him was kind of turned the tide toward
helping the war effort. They're having fun. And if you're

(12:29):
this lonesome little girl in a very small town and
your life is filled with work to helping around the house,
to be having the responsibilities of an adult, that sounds
like a lot of fun. Camping, you have friends, everybody
has each other's back, which Rmad was said to have

(12:51):
trouble when she was in school with bullying and being
picked on. And it just looked like fun. And there
were posters and there were rallies, and you learned different skills,
and you played sports. You were swimming and archery and

(13:12):
all of these neat, cool things that sound neat and
cool to a kid, instead of being on the farm
and working sent up to sundown. And I think that
probably made her and her sisters envious. Now, there's two
different stories of why their father was so against them
joining one to drive to the nearest group meeting would

(13:37):
have been several hours, and the second one was he
wasn't Remember he wasn't exactly sold on the whole Nazi idea,
but he enjoyed the benefits that he gained from it.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
You're right that Irma originally wanted to be a nurse,
so she into that effort. She worked at a sanatorium.
And you say that at that sanatorium she was exposed
to some Nazism as well, and might have met some
very very important or at least seen some important figures
while working there.

Speaker 4 (14:11):
Right, She goes to work there with the hopes of
being a nurse, as you said, and so she's surrounded again.
It was initially a place for people with TV too convalesce,
and then it turned into a hospital for Nazi soldiers
once the war began. So now she has surrounded by

(14:34):
all of these brave men soldiers who are being treated
for their wounds and their mental health. And she's sort
of entrenched in all of this. And it was also
a pride of Germany for that area, and sometimes Hitler
would come to visit. They believe that he would swim

(14:55):
in the pool as a relaxation and all of these
important James Himmler. So now she's sort of meeting the
rock stars of the Nazi movement. Now we don't know
if she actually came into contact with them or not,
but it would be certainly known that they're there to
visit and she's meeting this doctor who is doing all

(15:18):
of these experiments and learning how to help the war effort. Now,
never mind that he is using innocent women who have
been imprisoned at Ravensbrook to do these horrible surgeries on
without an aesthetic, things like grinding glass and dirt and
blood and mud into open wounds that he himself would make.

(15:41):
He is another rock star here in the Nazi movement,
and she gets to work with him. So here's this
little nobody from a no town that is suddenly right
in the heart and in the middle of all of
the excitement, and she is seeing firsthand first person how

(16:06):
Germany is picking itself up and again, you can be
a part of saving your country. So, yes, she did
want to be a nurse. That was her goal. But
for whatever reason, she just never made the cut or
she never passed the tests, and that was you know,
that was part of the difficulty of writing this book
is you would you would find something and you would

(16:29):
hear by interviewing people where there's no record of that,
and I would look anyway because I hate that. Well,
there's no record, so we don't know. I want to know.
I want to know what she was doing there, what
she was saying, how she was acting that. Obviously those
things aren't available. But nonetheless she's she's here in the
middle of it, and she's finding out what the quote

(16:51):
unquote real world is like, and she wants to be
a big part of it.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now, you talk about the by nineteen forty,
the concentration camps that were using slave labor and farming
it out to German industries. They were expanding these concentration
camps and they couldn't get enough guards, and so she

(17:19):
saw advertisements for this work at the concentration camps. Tell
us what she saw and why she would be attracted
to the concentration camps.

Speaker 4 (17:29):
Well, there's several stories on how she ends up applying
at the concentration camp. One is a doctor said, okay, well,
if you can't be a nurse, how about here being
a guard here? You know, easy work, great money, place
to live, good food. Then there's another story that another

(17:50):
nurse said. A nurse said to her, if you want
to be a nurse, why don't you apply at one
of the camps, and the same spiel, you know, easy money.
And then there's another one where she just saw an
ad in the paper because they were advertising these jobs
in the camp for guards as solid work. You're working

(18:13):
with people who are either mentally ill or who are criminals.
You know, you don't have a lot to do except
watch over them and make sure they don't get away.
They pay you, You have a place to live, and
you have good food. Now remember this is war torn
Germany and so things are being either rationed or they're

(18:37):
just not available, or for example, in Berlin, when the
siren rings, you're running into the shelter. And at this
job you don't have to worry about those things. Plus again,
you're making a better Germany by being part of the movement.
So this obviously intrigued her because she did apply at Robinsbrook,

(19:00):
which was the camp for females, and she had to
go through an interview process and then she was told
to come back when she was eighteen, which would have
been in a year, but she didn't return at eighteen
for whatever reason. And I'm wondering if it's not because
she was going to do one more try at being
a nurse and failed, so she returned to Robinsburg to

(19:22):
go through the training in nineteen forty two.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
You're right, though, that the wages at this concentration camp
that they were offering were probably twice as much as
she might have netted doing any other work.

Speaker 4 (19:37):
Oh, definitely, definitely. Women in the workforce were not making
much at all in the factories, which was the big
hiring places, and she would be making double dan she
would have been making in the factory, plus paying very
low wages for her apartment and a very low percentage

(20:04):
for reuben board, so to speak. So it was a
good deal for someone who was a single female. Most
of the off Saheran, the female guards were single women,
young with little or no education, from rural areas.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
You talk and write about the four weeks of training,
and she had to sign contracts, including confidentiality. But she
also had notorious people like Maria Mandel and Louise Danz
who were her supervisor and mentors. Initially, yes, and.

Speaker 4 (20:42):
Mandel and Don's were very vicious people, very vicious women,
And so that's your trainer. Now it's interesting, I think,
because there's there's just so much in the whole story
of Irma Greza. It's sort of a do as you're
supposed to, but not as I am, and you ended

(21:04):
up doing the not as I am. For example, there
was to be no beating of prisoners. So here are
these ignorant women coming into the workforce and told, Okay,
this is how you operate, this is how you work
on paper. But then they go out into the field
of the actual camp and everything just kind of goes

(21:28):
to the wayside because the inmates, the prisoners are being beaten,
they are being tortured, and it's not being done how
it is supposed to be on paper. So there's this
huge shock value. And then as you're working you learn, well,
these aren't prisoners of war, these aren't bad criminals. These

(21:52):
are Jews, and these are Gypsies, and these are people
who were perfectly innocent, just thrown into the situation because
of who they are. Prostitutes, women who are thrown into
the prison because they are part of the GOBT. So
you're learning, wait a minute, this isn't the reality I

(22:13):
was taught.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
You talk about the after the training and then she
is working in the camp. What is noted immediately compared
to the other females at what separates her and becomes
an important issue later on and throughout this, throughout the
trial and throughout the story.

Speaker 4 (22:37):
Part of the Irma Grays' story is her beauty. She
was a very attractive woman. She had those bright, bright
blue eyes, the very luxurious blonde hair, good bean skin, white,
perfect teeth. And it was a mask and it was

(23:00):
a boon because one, here she is the perfect quote
unquote German specimen. And two no one suspected her of
being so evil because she was so pretty. So many
survivors said she was strikingly beautiful. So I didn't think
anything evil could come out of that. She was also

(23:21):
very young. Many of the off Saharan were in their
mid twenties to early thirties. And here's Irma Gresa coming
in at nineteen, and she moves up the corporate ladder
very very quickly, in part because of her behavior of

(23:41):
her meanness, I guess, for want of a better word, Also,
again she's a very attractive woman, and people, both coworkers
and prisoners are just stunned by how pretty she is,
how soft she speaks, and how delicate she seems, and

(24:01):
the next thing you know, she's pulling out a pistol
and shooting someone because they looked at her, or beating
someone to death into the ground because they didn't do
the work that she thought that they could. So there's
what makes Irma Grace's story such a story is because
she was so physically attractive, and too she was so evil.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Part of this is her attention to her appearance. And
the cap is supposed to have a policy of no makeup.
The uniforms that the other female guards wore were nondescript.
She had soon had someone tailor her uniforms and had

(24:46):
somebody polishing her boots. She wore perfume, she wore makeup,
and so she really cultivated an appearance that would stand
out from the other female guards and get the attempt
of everyone, including prisoners.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
Yes, she works very hard to look that good. She
You know, Hitler was very against women wearing makeup. He
went so far as to spreading the story that lipstick
was made of animal excrement orma graza. She was all
about wearing makeup, looking good. Her hair had to be

(25:23):
perfect to go out to work in the camp. And
when you were an off Saharan, an female officer, there
in the camp, you had people cleaning your clothes, like
you said, shining her boots, working in her garden. So
she has slave labor whose job it is to make
sure those boots are perfect. And many, many survivors said,

(25:46):
you could see your reflection in her shoes. And if
you look at older pictures of offsa Hearin and their uniform,
many of them did not wear the boots. They just
wore the old style punky black shoes. And you're right,
the uniform was very, very basic because Hitler believed that

(26:09):
women shouldn't dress loose or quote unquote like women in Paris,
for example, because that was just scandalous to him. But
what she did is she had her prisoner staff alter
her uniforms and keep them clean so that when she
stepped out of her hut or her room to go

(26:32):
to work, she was perfection.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Now, she was not regarded the same. The female guards
were not regarded the same as the SS guards. So
what was their status at this camp and how did
she see the SS men herself? And what was at
least the confirmed reports of her sexuality there at that
camp and promiscuity if any.

Speaker 4 (26:57):
Well, according to legend, she saw a lot of SS
men in a certain way, but that's never been proven.
And she the office heroin were female guards with the
exact same duties mostly as the male guards in the camps,

(27:18):
but a woman could not be SS, so they were
called SS helpers. And she was under some very anti
female leadership who believed women did not belong working in

(27:39):
that camp. You know, a woman's place was in the
home and she shouldn't have any kind of power controlled
at all. So on the other hand, you have Heinrich
Himmler saying, okay, female officeherent are the same as the
SS men in the camp, their brothers and sisters working together.

(28:00):
One is not better than the other. But again reality
rears its head, and the male officers, so many of
them didn't take the female seriously. They didn't belong here,
and they called them whorees, and they called them bitches,
and they made fun of them, and they used them,
you know, sexually, and threw them away. So she's walking

(28:21):
into this very very male dominated world. And the stories
are that she bedded several known leaders like doctor Mingele.
The story is that she was one of his lovers.
There were a few more noted leaders that she was

(28:45):
hass for example, that she was one of his lovers,
but it was never actually proven by anyone who survived.
Nobody saw them holding hands or talking intimately or kissing
or anything like that. The story was that she You know,
there's another issue is in writing this book is so

(29:08):
much of her history has been built on rumor and
an window. Now, she did have an abortion at one
point in the camp by a Jewish female doctor who
was an inmate who worked in the medical portion of
the camp, by whom no one knows whose child that was.

(29:29):
And was she as promiscuous as she was put out
to be, maybe, but maybe not.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
So.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
Yeah, she's you know, thinking, oh, here we go, a
woman finally has some power, she has a uniform, she
has a whip, she has a position, and now I'm
as equal as a male. She goes in there and nope,
you're not. Hes did, for example, didn't believe in females
working at the camps. So there you've got the of

(30:01):
the camp itself. And as you know, the ideations kind
of filter down from the leader. So it was okay
to be sexist, and it was okay to be nasty
to their face or say things to them. It wasn't
going to get punished.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
You also talk about, just briefly, that the SS men
would have no use for even though they employed mistresses
all the time, they would not leave their wife and
their family. Again, they were playing a role of that
they were religious and they were upstanding citizens. So they
really did treat them like poorors and bitches as they

(30:40):
called them.

Speaker 4 (30:41):
Oh definitely, yeah. Now I don't want to say all
of them did, but many, many of the leaders. You know,
for example, Mingley, you know, is a family man, and
yet he had plenty of mistresses on the side. Arma
Greza was one of them. And maybe Arma Greza only

(31:04):
being in her twenties early twenties, thinking oh, he's going
to leave his family and his children and be with me,
and she would have had such status being the wife
of someone like that, but it wasn't going to happen,
and it happens today still, you know, Oh, he's going
to leave his family in his comfortable position in his
life for me because he loves me and I'm prettier,

(31:28):
and it's not going to happen. And if it happens,
especially in this situation, Minglet might have been in trouble
for doing something like that. So you know, if she
set her cap for a high ranking Nazi officer, she
would have been sorely disappointed because those men were not

(31:48):
going to leave their Like you said, they're Christian families
and children and life that they've built for a twenty
year old silly girl like Arma Greza.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
That Jesus that opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Now tell us about this adherence to this sub human
Hitler subhuman philosophy and how it played into Irma's behavior
as reported in the Camps. What did it manifest itself
In terms of behavior, Irma.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
Became very abusive. Initially, she started out at the camps
as she would make conversation with the prisoners and introduce
herself by her first name, and she would tell them
about her life and her sisters, and there were so
many rules broken by just doing that. And eventually, particularly

(32:47):
when she was moved from Robin's Book to Oswitch, they
saw a change in her. She became much harder. She
became much more cruel. She would beat and torture prisoners
for no reason except because she could and one living
witness said that she knew Irma at Robinsbrook and then

(33:10):
when she saw her again at Oswitch, she said, she
walked taller, she looked different. She had been tailoring her
uniforms and she said, Irma, you look like a real
ss now and Irma Grezza only said hello and kept walking.
So she saw a huge change in her. And you know,

(33:34):
prisoners would gauge learned to gauge off Saharan by how
they walked, how they looked, how I worked in a prison,
and I know exactly how they did it. They just
watched and they listened and they saw how these officers
dealt with things day to day, so they knew who
they could manipulate, who they could push, who they needed
to stay away from. And Irma Greza was definitely one

(33:56):
to stay away from. One survivor said, we ran in
fear every time we saw her. And she was known
to just walk into, for example, the kitchen and pull
out her whip and just beat down a woman because
she was standing there. She started assisting Mingalay in what

(34:18):
was called selections, meaning you go into the camp and
you select those going to the gas chamber, and she
began assisting him, which was not part of her job description.
She could have easily gotten gotten out of even having
a part of that. She wasn't even supposed to be
a part of that. Yet there she is with Mingalay,

(34:39):
going into the huts, going into the yard and selecting,
sometimes at random and sometimes for health reasons. She'd select
these people and send them to the gas chamber without
blinking an eye. Now, she also what some of the
survivors called made friends with prisoners. But I did some

(35:04):
research on that. I don't believe she was making friends
with them. I believe it was a part of her
power play. You could never really be a friend with
these people who you are lording over, because you're holding
them in your hand, you're holding their lives. She could

(35:25):
have said, you know, hello, here's a bit of sausage
that you know you can have. She could have easily said,
gas chamber, take her, and off they went. So it
was a relationship of friendship per se, built out of fear,
and that was one of her power tactics.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Despite having all this power and these ss cards not
being great people either incredibly cruel people as well. Remarkably,
she had to be restrained or overdoing it with the
prisoners remarkably.

Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yes, yes, is that something else when that even the
Nazis she was too evil for even the Nazis. Now, Also,
I think people need to understand not all of these
officer hearin or officers who worked at these camps were
cruel people. Not. There was a spectrum. There's a spectrum
of people who actually assisted prisoners by giving them paper

(36:28):
or pencils or food or such or even there are
a few officers there at Elswitch who are part of
the underground resistance. And then you have the middle group
who are there to do a job. They do their job,
they do what they're supposed to do, and that's the
end of your day. And then you had that smaller
percent like Arma Greza, like the women who trained her,

(36:52):
that are just drunk with power and for whatever reason
I believe in their soul is never filled up completely
no matter what they do. So they're going to use
this anger and this again meanness to lord over these people,

(37:14):
beat them, kick them, make them do you know ridiculous
things like if she didn't like the way that they
were standing in line for count, she had them holding
bricks over their heads for hours and hours and hours.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
So she she also had you know, what they called
sport where she would take something and throw it into
the zone where if the outside guards with guns saw
a prisoner walking through, it was automatically shoot to kill.

(37:54):
And she would.

Speaker 4 (37:54):
Purposely throw something into that zone and then tell the
prisoner to go get it. And she picked prisoners who
didn't maybe they didn't read or maybe they didn't speak German,
so they couldn't read the signs that said, you know,
no trespassing, kill zoned, and they ran in there to
fetch it up and they were shot and killed. And
she thought that that was just so much fun. That

(38:16):
it was said there was up to thirty people a
day that she would have killed in this fashion.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
You're right that she rose in the ranks of Nazi
with the Nazis very very quickly, and soon was supervising
about eighteen thousand prisoners.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
Right now. Females would have never been the I guess
you'd say, the warden of the camp. They'd never be
that that was a man's job. But they could rise
through the ranks to a certain rank Ierma did not
make that rank, but she made second highest. She was
very young. She moved as I said, she moved very

(38:58):
quickly through the ranks, and soon she was supervising thousands
and thousands of prisoners.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
You talk about the expansion of the concentration camps and
then the change in the emphasis with the Final Solution
nineteen forty three. So the selections are ramped up and
the executions are increased, and the concentration camps are expanded.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yes, yes, the murdering of Jews was not happening fast
enough because you remember the whole idea was to annihilate
the entire group, right, So they had the meeting, the
Final Solution, the okay, how are we going to do this?
So yes, they started building the gas chambers, they started

(39:45):
rounding up more people, they started killing people on site,
the death marches, and it just became a kill factory.
And if you take the population of Berlin was the
largest city in Europe at the time. If you took

(40:05):
the population of Berlin and you emptied out that city
no people, it would still not equal the number of
Jews and also POWs that were murdered in those camps
at that time. And I have a chart several of

(40:26):
them in the book showing the population then of the
major cities and the population of certain groups that were
murdered during that time period. So imagine no people in
New York. You just emptied out New York right now,
and it would still not come near the number of

(40:46):
people that were murdered during the Holocaust. And what's very
difficult is we really don't know how many people were
killed during the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yes, you're right that Irma and her comrades on Jacks
Nuar thirtieth, nineteen forty three were anxious to hear high
ranking Hermann Gering and propaganda minister Joseph Goebels speak over
the radio. But at the same time, the Royal Air
Force dropped the bomb on Berlin and the war turned.

Speaker 4 (41:19):
Yes, Goebbels was supposed to make a big speech, and
you know Hitler's supposed to make a big speech. So
I'm sure that Gray's a rabid follower, was probably so
looking forward to hearing this, and as as you stated,
her comrades, and yet they were bombed and the war

(41:43):
did start taking a turn, and you know, Irma would
brag to prisoners how clever quote clever they all were,
and they were going to win the war. But when
the tides turned. Many many people started abandoning the Nazi
ideology and any part of it. But Graysa and her

(42:05):
ilk stayed thinking it's going to turn. We will win
the war, we will be the master race. We will
be and even down toward the end she believed this.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yes, you're right. She was ordered back to Ravensbrook where
she had started, and she oversaw a transport of prisoners
and the Nazis were just moving prisoners from camp to
camp and trying to kill them as fast as possible
along the way. You say they died in the marches,
They died various ways. They couldn't man the ovens and

(42:44):
put enough people in there. They were desperate and it
was evident they were going to lose the war, and
so they decided to ramp up the killing.

Speaker 4 (42:54):
They did. Yes, some people were burned alive. They were
doing the death marches. Trying to move them away from
the where the Allies were invading, is what they were doing.
And so they took the females from Opsfitch and they
moved them to Robinsbrook. Irma overseeing that, now, I tried

(43:18):
to find out did they move them by cattle car?
When she was doing this did they move them by march?
I could not find that information anywhere because it's just
simply not listed. Also, as the Allies were approaching these
camps started just ditching paperwork, burning it, gathering up all
their files, burning it. And then they even had living

(43:39):
prisoners dig up the dead and the putrid corpses and
smashed them with hammers and such and then scatter the ashes.
So it could not be determined how many were murdered
at the camps themselves. So Irma has told, you know, okay,
take this group, marched them to Revensbrook, put them in there,

(44:01):
and this were these were miles. And one thing that
really stuck with me through writing this book is one
of the women who survived the march said, I learned
you can sleep and walk because it was such a treacherous,
treacherous journey. So there they are there there, you know,

(44:25):
the asleep walking and marching because you didn't dare stop,
you didn't dare have to rest because they would just
shoot you on site without thought. So they were moved
to Robin's Brook and then she was given another group
and sent them back for the Ovens to Osfitch and

(44:51):
she's moving inmates in a desperate attempt to one get
rid of as many people as they could, as prisoners
as they could, and to try to save the whole
ideal of Germany.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Let's uses that as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now, let's get to the liberation in nineteen
forty five in April. But especially fascinating is you take
us right to bergen Belsen. Irma Graza is there with Joseph,
the notorious Joseph Kramer, when liberators come to the camp

(45:33):
and find an incredible horror they had no idea about.

Speaker 4 (45:40):
Yes, now Kramer is said to be another one of
her lovers, again never proven again, if she was hoping
for that, it wasn't going to happen. Kramer was also
very very sexist. But they greet the liberators as if
they're welcoming someone to a party, And meanwhile there's thousands

(46:00):
and thousands of dead lying in stacks around them. The
whole sewage system has given out because it's overloaded, so
there's sewage throughout the camp. I can't imagine how it
felt or looked or smelled when those allies moved into

(46:25):
one of those camps. I can't even I've read so much,
but I just can't imagine. And there were grown men
on the side of the Allies who had seen battle
after battle after battle and lived through so many heinous things.
Pears were coursing down their cheeks as they drove through

(46:47):
that camp. And Kramer didn't understand why they were so
upset or angry. And he was saying, these people are homosexuals,
and their prisoners and their criminals, and they deserve to
be in prison. And one of the liberators turned to

(47:08):
him and said, you have created a hell. You've managed
to create a hell. So the Allies had large speakers
on the back of a lorry a truck, and they
were driving through the camps, because you have to remember,
these camps were huge. We're talking football field on football field.

(47:30):
They were acres and acres and acres. So they would
drive through the camps with these speakers on the truck, explaining,
you are free. The camp is no longer a camp,
you're no longer a prisoner of war. You're no longer
a prisoner. You're free. And people came spilling out to

(47:50):
kiss the ground, even kiss the tanks, and many of
the female prisoners reported that very young souls were crying,
some were vomiting, some had to stop to be sick
on the road because it was so horrific. And Arma
Gresa again is standing in there with Kramer, Welcome to

(48:12):
berghen Belsen, Come on in. And also remember they knew,
you know, their goose had been cooked, so they're basically
kissing ass and saying, oh, welcome, I'm glad you're here.
You know, do you want me to show you round?
Kramer offered, would you like a tour? And there are

(48:32):
I don't know how many different versions of how Irma
was arrested or detained, but there were several versions of
you know, some said that she was stopped on the
side of the road. Some said that she was caught
in a barn away from the camp in hiding in
a haypile. Others said that she was willingly standing there
next to a hut. And one of the things I'm

(48:56):
most proud of in this book is I have a
photo color photo of the key she held in her
pocket when she was arrested. Wow, found that.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
I have to say too. Just reminding me about the photos,
an incredible array of unique and extraordinary photos. I don't
know how many photos in total, but impressive and fascinating
collection of photos.

Speaker 4 (49:27):
Oh, there's over one hundred and eighty images. And I
purposely this is a first for me. I purposely had
the book printed in color because I wanted to bring
the experience and the story as close as possible to
the reader. And when you look at these images in color,
it brings it to life. You see what the key
that she held in her hand looks like. You see

(49:49):
what the document that ordered her death actually looked like.
And some of the images have never been seen in public.
Some of them are or rare images. And I believe
that when you look at that key in color, it's
putting you as close there as humanly possible, and it

(50:12):
feels different. I had a reader tell me they said
when they looked at that photo and a few others,
they had to close the book because they had such
bad chills because they could feel it. And that's why
I wanted to do the inside and color. And I
worked with nonprofit organizations, museums, memorials across the globe to

(50:35):
bring the images that I wanted into the book.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Yes, congratulations, thank you, I'm glad you liked it. Let's
talk about her interrogation and interviews with the media right
away and her depiction as the beautiful beast of Belson.
Tell us what she has to say initially in her
own defense.

Speaker 4 (51:01):
Oh, she was innocent. She was ridding the world of
people that didn't need to be in the world. She
was doing what you know, Germany set out to do.
And she was very angry and she was very defiant.
A journalist did go into the camp when she was

(51:21):
arrested and was being detained and interviewed her, and she
was angry. She told him, you know, this was her job,
and this is what she was doing. She was sold,
hook line and sinker on the Nazi idea ideology. And
that's when I believe, after reading so many news accounts,

(51:41):
when the news fell in love with her because she
was very pretty. And again there's that juxtaposition of being
very attractive and being very evil, and we still do
do that today when we're reading crime books. How can
somebody who looks that good be so disgustingly angry and

(52:07):
evil and mean and negative. And if you think about it,
it really goes back to the Bertillion method, where they
were trying to determine a person's looks like, for example,
the slope of the nose, the width of the poorhead.
You know well, and we still say it today. He
doesn't look like a criminal.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Yeah, you talk about the nineteen women and twenty six
men that to her await trial, and they're staying at
the cell prison located in Lower Saxony, Germany. It's an
old constructed in seventeen hundreds, and she has this major

(52:48):
Cranfield was assigned to represent four of the defendants in court,
and that would be Irma, i'lse Lothe, Hilde Lobayer and
Joseph Klippl. And so they were all transferred to this
Luneberg prison and a waiting trial.

Speaker 4 (53:08):
Right She's being held awaiting the big trial to start.
This was a turn in world history, this trial, because
it was the first time that the world was introduced
to the horrors of what was done in these camps. Now.
Her sister would later brag to an interviewer that whatever

(53:31):
Irma said or did, people would do for her. For example,
she would say, give this letter to my sister and
the jailer would do that. Or they come back from
trial one night and someone is doing a search of
her room, and she said get out of there, and
they ran out because she said, no way, There's no
way her you know, or her sister was selling wolf tickets.

(53:53):
There's no way that Irma grezo would have had that
kind of power behind bars. None of them did. And they,
the British Army, did it so carefully that none of
them would have been able to tell someone something or
ask them to break a law, and they would have
done it for them. They selected those people very carefully
who guarded over them. So here she is. And I

(54:16):
also thought was interesting is they fed them only so
many calories a day, usually soup, and so gone were
these opulent parties that Irma was used to attending as
an off Shaharin, the good food, the drink. There's a
lot of alcohol and drugs utilized by the people working

(54:38):
in the camps, right, and so that was gone. She's
just a person in a very sparse sell no fancy clothes,
no jewelry, no perfume, eating soup. And of course some
of them argue, you know that this was against Geneva

(54:59):
convention and we're not supposed to be treated this badly.
Blasi blas yeah, oh yeah, yeah. They bitched about that
that they weren't being treated fairly. Bergen Belsen was liberated.
The armies made the office hearing and the mail officers
carry the dead to the pits to be covered over.

(55:20):
And they complained about that, well, we don't have any gloves.
She was a little over six foot tall, and she said,
I have a bad back, so I can't do this.
And they were basically told, you had prisoners carrying the
dead this whole time, no gloves, no nothing protective. Typhus
ran rampant. They had bad backs too. I'm sure you

(55:44):
know you're going to do this.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (55:46):
They bitched that it wasn't fair that they were being
treated like this.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
Let's talk about this trial the British military. It was
conducted by the British military and tried under British rule,
and of co worse than the British press followed the
story more closely than anyone, but it was an international story.
And how was Irma Grasa among all the other people?

(56:12):
How was she depicted in their reporting?

Speaker 4 (56:16):
Oh, she was the beautiful beast, and they always had
to make sure they talked about how her hair looked
or what she wore today. And there was even an
article that said stockings. She wore new stockings and her
shoes would have been coveted by many women reading this article.

(56:36):
So they really built her up as this, you know,
glamb chick of the Nazi group. They didn't do that
to any of the men or any of the other women.
They called the other women fat and cows and frumpy
and ugly. But Irma Greso was referred to as lovely
and beautiful and titillating. And you know her blonde curl

(57:00):
and how she would toss her blonde curls. But Irma
also played up to the press where she would look
into the cameras and she would flip her hair. She
had a fellow inmate fix her hair every time there
was a break so she would look good for the press.

(57:21):
Irma liked herself.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
What did she'd say to other people prior to all
of this about her chances of being an actress after
the war?

Speaker 4 (57:32):
Ah, she told her oh, I'm sorry, let me back up.
She had told several prisoners who survived she planned on
being an actress after the war. She said, I've seen
many things, and I know things, and so she was
pretty much convinced that she was going to spend maybe
a year maybe two behind bars, and then be out

(57:55):
and her her career from here we just soar as
a beauty queen, an actress, or someone on stage and screen.
She did have a lovely singing voice, it was said,
so perhaps that was part of her plan. But she
had asked her sister, she said, what do you think
they'll give me? One year? Two years?

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Let's esse this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now take us to the trial, because you
say that her sister was very supportive. Helene or Helen
and her brother attended the trial as well. Otto, yes,
but tell us about the witnesses that testified at this
trial and some of the horrifying accounts regarding Irma Graza.

Speaker 4 (58:43):
One of the incidents that got to me was a
young young girl had found a potato on a dead
body and was cooking that potato, and Irma walked up
and said, that's a nice potato and she said yes,
and it was well, you know you're not supposed to
have it, and she said, hold your hand over the

(59:03):
fire as punishment, and when the girl did, Irma stamped
down on her hand and ground it into the hot coals,
so that she had permanent damage. She had several fingers broken,
and that says to me so much about her character,
using that kindness and that beauty as a mask. But

(59:27):
one by one, survivors would go to the stand and testify,
and they would testify how they were beaten or they
saw people beaten. One woman was just standing outside of
her hut watching a new group coming in, and Irma
was riding by on her bicycle, and she said get inside,

(59:49):
and the woman turned to go through the door and
Irma shot her dead. They testified how at a pel
or the count where they were to stand in lines
and be counted each day, how if someone fainted, or
if someone tried to move to be with a family
member that had just come in, Irma would see it

(01:00:11):
and she'd reached them apart and she'd beat them down,
and she'd use her boots and her whip. She had
a special whip made that would particularly cut skin and
maim and she would beat them with that whip. How
they observed her making the selections with minglay, how callous

(01:00:33):
she was. And what's interesting to me was the trial,
A lot of it was focused specifically on Irma Gresa.

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
One of the most anticipated testimonies, obviously is Irma Gresa herself,
and you say, it's extraordinary, and you write the extraordinary
account of what she says. She's the fire and she's sarcastic,
and she's on the stand for quite a while and

(01:01:05):
being cross examined. Tell us just a little bit of
some of the behavior and some of the things she
says in defense to her behavior at the camps.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
Oh, she justified everything she did, and she would for example,
one of the cross examination questions was, from what we understand,
you would herd people like cattle into a line to
go into the crematorium, and she says, not like cattle,

(01:01:38):
and they would say, you know. Actually one of the
one of the interrogators ask her, was it because she
had a childhood where she was bullied and picked on
and teased and taunted that she turned into someone like
she turned into and Irma responded in a way that

(01:01:59):
elluded to it. But then she said, but I've grown
since then. So she would never give specific responses even
when they pinned her down, and a lot of her
responses consisted of I don't know, I don't recall, well,
you know, did you go through the whole business with

(01:02:22):
your eyes closed, And she said, on the contrary, my
eyes were very open. But she was really a very
difficult person on the stand to question because if she
wasn't turning toward that, I don't recall, I don't remember,
I wasn't there, then it was okay, well then what

(01:02:43):
did you do and what happened here? Specifically? Then she
would be giving very monocillo responses yes, snow, or she
would give partial responses. And it was interesting to me,
how here she is, she's twenty one years old, she's

(01:03:05):
sitting on this stand of the most important trial of
the century, certainly one of the most important in our
history of the world. All of these people watching, everyone
writing down her every move, how she looks, what she says,
and she is so defiant. Now there is one story
how afterwards one night she went to her room and

(01:03:28):
cried all night long and had very little sleep. But
here's this kid, really, that's under this tremendous amount of pressure,
tremendous amount of scrutiny, and she's so mean, she's angry,
and she's defiant, and she is going to not take
part in any of this.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
You write that she in response to all these people's
accounts and their veracity, she says, they were exaed rating,
or it didn't happen, or they were making an elephant
out of a small fly, so making it seem insignificant.

Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
Yes, she was saying. At one point they said something
about one of the testimonies that was given, and she said,
perhaps it is their nature to lie. Yes, that got
me also, And then when she said, they're exaggerating, they
make an elephant out of a small fly, kind of
our saying in the States, make a mountain out of

(01:04:29):
a mohill. So even when she was faced with the
truth and she was pinned down and she was made
to respond to the truth, she still would twist it. Okay, Yeah,
I had a special whip. Oh, she had a special whip, mate,
she says, But when she hit people with it, it
really didn't hurt. Well, what was it. It was a

(01:04:49):
pigtail made of cellophane. You know. Well, I didn't really
hit them that hard. I didn't kick them that hard.
So she wasn't she wasn't about to crack on the stand, and.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
Her defense attorney didn't even go as far as she
did on the stand in terms of her attitude and behavior.
But he just said that she was just following orders
and that, and he was denying these victims and witnesses accounts,
wasn't he. So it wasn't much of a defense. But
he put up as vigorous defense as he could, right, he.

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
Did what he could.

Speaker 4 (01:05:31):
He even went so far as to say, well, these
young Jewish women, Now think about that, young Jewish women.
You know, he's still trying to taint the that they're
being Jewish. Has something to do with them naturally being
liars or mountain out of a mohill or that kind

(01:05:54):
of thought process is. But he he had a fine
line to walk. It was his job to defend these people. However,
we already saw because it was one of the first
times that a film was shown in a court of law.
We already saw what they did, because we saw the
aftermath in video, and we've already heard these people testifying.

(01:06:17):
So what can you do with that? And so he
did allude to the fact that they were Jewish, so
they were probably lying, or they were young, or they
were old, or they were you know, sick already when
they went in, so they really couldn't tell or this
was a camp of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
How could you even know who was Rma Grayson and

(01:06:38):
who wasn't. It was an interesting use of defense.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
I thought this trial attracted the biggest viewership because of
its date and this and Irma was the focus of
this trial. It would seem so tell us of the
verdict and the world's response.

Speaker 4 (01:07:07):
I think everybody knew what the outcome was going to be.
It was just who was going to get the death
penalty and who was going to be imprisoned. Not all
of them received the death penalty, some received a few years,
one or two were acquitted. But Arma Graza and several
other women received the death penalty. And when it was announced,

(01:07:34):
she didn't move, she didn't flinch. One newspaper reporter said
her cheeks reddened. They turned, and they went back out
of the courtroom, and one of them sobbed very loudly.
Now a lot of books will say it was Irma
who cried out, but it was never really solidified in

(01:07:57):
any kind of legal paper war account. And then she
reportedly cried when she got to her cell And I
honestly feel like though she still believed that nothing, she
did was wrong. See, a lot of them were saying
I was only following orders. I was only following orders.
That is not one hundred percent true, because she could

(01:08:21):
have easily left that job. From the minute she put
in her application to when she was working in the camps.
She could have There was a process. You couldn't just
you know, but you could go through the process and
you could either be moved to a section in the
I would say it was like a business office where
you did the typing and the filing and such. At

(01:08:43):
the camps, answered the phones, did the mail. You could
either work there or you could actually just leave. So
she did have a chance to leave at any time,
and chose to stay. All of them some did leave,
some left during way back at Revensbrook. That she chose

(01:09:04):
to stay. And I do believe from the moment that
she entered her application to the moment that she was
hung for her crime, she believed she was doing the
right thing. And even her last word was schnell, hurry
up to the hangman. So she had one last piece

(01:09:26):
of little power she was going to use and utilize
that little bitty piece of the Irma Greza to end
her life and she was going to give an order.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
That's backed up with the correspondence between her sister after
she's she's gotten given the death penalty, the correspondence with
her sister, and then the letter to her family again
expressing I'm dying for my country. Don't be sad. It's
a fascinating correspondent.

Speaker 4 (01:10:04):
It was, wasn't it. She? You know, I done pretty
deep to find her letters that do exist between her
and her sisters, and her very last note she wrote
in her cell prior to being hung that next morning,
and it is it's I'm dying for my country. I'm
a hero, I'm a martyr, I'm a symbol. Don't cry,

(01:10:27):
We'll all And even I found the poem that she
wrote when she was imprisoned, and even in that poem
she talks about don't worry. One day we'll laugh and
love again. So she was convinced that she was either
going to she was going to get out of it,
and she was going to leave a mark on the world.

(01:10:48):
And you know, if you think about it, Dan, she did.
We're talking about her to Dan. It's twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
Five, yes, and remarkably, again, we won't go into it
too far. Because just that there are people that believe
that she got a rod deal in this, and then
she has turned into some martyr of sorts with a
certain segment of people.

Speaker 4 (01:11:13):
Yes, I was contacted by Holocaust deniers and revisionists, and
I listened to what they had to say because one,
I found it part of her story and I wanted
to tell as much of her story as I could.
And two, it was interesting to see how they came
about their ideal and their thought process. And shortly after

(01:11:37):
Graza was hung, there was a group started where they
were trying to have Irma legally declared a saint. They
had little outfits and everything a little and to this day,
somebody's done a Facebook page for her, and if you

(01:11:58):
dig enough, you find out that there are blogs and
websites dedicated to supporting her. That she was a patsy,
that she took the brunt of what other women should
have been punished with because she was pretty. They said

(01:12:19):
that she was singled out because she was pretty, so
that's why she was hung and tried, because they had
to have somebody to do it. Now, doesn't that sound
familiar because we still say that today about certain female
prisoners or certain female criminals.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Yes, it's amazing in this book too, we won't have
time to go into it, but the esteem doctor Lee
Miller weighs in on the psychopathy of Irma Greza. And
also you have a fascinating forward by doctor Vronsky.

Speaker 4 (01:12:54):
Yes, Peter Vronsky. That meant so much to me because
I tell you I used Bronsky's material when I was
an undergraduate school and then in graduate school and then
working toward my PhD. And now he's written an introduction
for my book. So I am so very honored by that.
And I just I love him as a person and
as a researcher because he's such a good guy, and

(01:13:18):
he's so interesting, and he's just a brilliant guy when
he knows his stuff. And so I was so honored
when he agreed to write the forward for me.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
I want to thank you very much, Judith A. Yates
for coming on and talking about this incredible book. Hermac
Gray's a Becoming the Hyena of Auschwitz. For those people
that might want to take a further look. Do you
have a website and do do any social media?

Speaker 4 (01:13:44):
I do a social media all over the media. It's
true crimebook. Dot net. You can also go to JUDITHA
Yates dot com and the book will be available on
Amazon and all the major books stores websites. You'll order
it through their website. And I ask everyone please send

(01:14:05):
me a review or put a review on Amazon. Let
me know what you think, because it means a lot
to me that people enjoy this book and learn something
from this book.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Absolutely, thank you so much for this Irma Graza becoming
the Hayena of Auschwitz. Judith A Yates, thank you for
this interview, and you have a great evening, and good night,
Thank you, Dan, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Good night.

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