In October 1941, the Nazis began construction of Burkanau, which would become the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub camps that made up the Avitz complex.

From March 1943 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, one of the camp staff members became a young German woman who would become notorious not only for her pure sadism, beatings, and arbitrary shootings of female prisoners, but also for setting her half-starved trained dogs on women and for selecting prisoners for the gas chambers.

After the war, she would become the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals.

Her name was Irma Graca.

Mr.

Ilsa Ida Graca was born on October 7th, 1923 in Vrehen, then part of the VHimar Republic, which was the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933.

Irma was the third of five children and both parents, mother Berta and father Alfred, worked in dairy production.

When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in January 1933, Irma was 9 years old.

Since Irma’s father was not a Nazi sympathizer and despised everything associated with them, he never allowed his children to join Nazi youth organizations, even though they wanted to.

In January 1936, when Irma was 12, her mother Berta committed suicide by ingesting hydrochloric acid after discovering her husband’s extrammarital affair with the daughter of a local bar owner.

Irma was then raised solely by her father.

Alfred Grass was a devout Christian, very strict and rigid with his children and frequently used physical violence to discipline them.

At school, Irma Grace performed poorly academically and according to her sister Helen was mistreated by other students.

Helen recalled, “When the girls fought and quarreled, Irma never had the courage to fight but ran away.

Eventually, in 1938, 14-year-old Irma left school and her father’s home and worked at the Fenberg dairy factory from early spring until winter.

She then moved to Lychen where she worked in a retail store for 6 months.

In 1939 at the age of 15, Irma Graca went to the Hoen Lucian sanatorium where she worked as a nurse assistant for about 2 years and as a trainee under the medical supervision of Carl Ghart, the sanatorium’s medical superintendent.

World War II began on September 1st, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

At that time, Grace was still at the Hoen Sanatorium where she wanted to become a fully qualified nurse.

However, due to her unsatisfactory academic performance in 1941 at the age of 17, she was sent to a dairy farm in Fenberg where she operated a buttermaking machine.

She stayed there until June 1942 and the following month she was sent to serve as a guard at Ravensbrook, the only major women’s concentration camp established by the Nazis.

Beginning in the summer of 1942, SS doctors subjected female prisoners at Ravensbrook to unethical medical experiments.

The main coordinator of these experiments was Carl Ghart whom Irma knew from the Hoenlicken sanatorium and his assistants were doctors Hererta Oberhoiser and Fritz Fiser.

They often used hammers to break the prisoner’s legs, then infected the open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored healing with and without various chemicals such as sulfanylamide, which was an early antibiotic to prevent infections.

Believing this could help in treating amputated soldiers, they also tested various bone fixation and transplantation methods.

These experiments included amputations and were often carried out without anesthesia.

It is believed that Greasie served as a nursing assistant during the experiments and was exposed to the affforementioned atrocities which may have affected her personality and turned her into a violent satist.

In early 1943, when she returned home and told her family she was supervising female prisoners at the Ravensbrook camp, her father beat her with a belt or whip and forbade her from returning home.

In March 1943, Irma Graca was assigned to Ashvitz Burkanau which was located in German occupied Poland.

Burkanau was the largest of more than 40 camps and subcamps that made up the Avitz complex.

It was opened as a branch of Avitz in March 1942 and served simultaneously as an extermination center for Jews.

Some Awitz survivors remember Irma Graca as a young and beautiful woman.

Nina Klesca later recalled her first encounter.

Irma Gracie grabbed my cheek and said, “Ah, they say you look a lot like me, and I wanted to make sure it was really true.

” And I in my total naivity said, “Ah, I don’t think there’s a resemblance.

I had never seen anyone more beautiful.

” And I said it sincerely.

She was like a vision.

Dr.

Jazella Pearl, also a survivor of Avitz, later said, “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 happiest, most innocent eyes one could imagine.

And yet Irma Grace was the most depraved, cruel, and perverted person I have ever encountered.

In her memoir, Five Chimneys, Awitz survivor, Olga Langiel wrote that Graca had affairs not only with Dr.

Ysef Mangal, but also with many other Nazis.

When it came time to select women for the gas chambers, Leniel noted that Irma Graca deliberately chose the most beautiful prisoners out of jealousy and spite.

Masha Greenbomb remembered, “When we saw her, we ran.

We ran.

We just ran because when she found you, she would kick you to the ground and then she would go for the neck with her boots and kill people that way.

” However, there were other female prisoners to whom Irmaie showed another side of her personality.

That was the case with Corolla Stern Steinhart, then a young Jewish girl from Germany.

She later recalled, “My sister arrived at the camp and I wanted to know what had happened to my parents.

She said they were all dead.

Grace witnessed this.

She saw me talking and hugging my sister and she stood there and cried, something nobody had ever seen before.

And then she told me, “Carola.

” She had heard my sister call me Carola.

Otherwise, she wouldn’t have known.

She said, “You don’t need to worry.

Your sister will stay with you now.

” My sister then had to go through all kinds of different procedures, and I thought we would stay together, but it was just a false promise.

Then they sent her to another camp.

There were also some women whom Irma actually liked.

That was the case with a Jewish woman from Slovakia named Magda.

Irma who treated Magda like an older sister even asked her what she thought about her new boyfriend whom she introduced to Magda.

However, toward the other prisoners, she remained cruel.

After the war, Magda recalled.

One day before roll call, two runners came with four women whose breasts had been cut off after Irma Greasie had whipped them.

After I tended to the women, I told Irma, “Imagine if someone did this to you.

What a shame.

” At that moment, Irma raised the whip against me and I said, “Whip me! Whip me! I know you like to see blood.

I am offended.

” Then I walked away and Irma came after me.

She said softly, “Forgive me.

” At Ashvitz, Graca fell in love with SS man France Wulfgang Hutsinger, who was the chief engineer of the construction department at the main Avitz camp.

However, despite this relationship, Gracie had many lovers, and the aforementioned Nenah Klesca, then 16 years old, was used by Irma as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma held lesbian orgies in the barracks.

Klesca later recalled, “Greece liked me.

Thank God she never abused me, but she made me stand watch outside the barrack while she made love to the prettiest Jewish girls there.

And when she was making love with another woman, she wanted to be warned, so I stood guard to see if perhaps other guards of her rank or other Germans were coming.

She was and had total power.

She could do anything she wanted with anyone at any time.

Irma Grece had numerous affairs with prisoners, especially with pretty Polish women, and when she got tired of them, she beat them or selected them for the gas chamber to be killed.

However, she also abused male prisoners.

When a handsome Georgian man rejected Greece’s advances, he had to watch as Irma dragged his naked girlfriend by the hair across the camp and then whipped her after torturing the woman he loved.

She had the man executed by firing squad and the woman sent to the camp brothel.

When Mangala discovered she was having affairs with Jewish prisoners who were considered racially inferior, he ended his intimate relationship with her.

Greece had so many lovers that by January 1944, she contracted syphilis.

She also had several abortions.

Dr.

Jazella Pearl performed one of these abortions.

And Irma’s only concern was the pain she would feel.

Perhaps because of these abortions, Grace hated other pregnant women.

And in Achvitz Burkanau, she tied the legs of women in labor so they couldn’t give birth and died in great agony.

Because of her cruelty and brutality, the prisoners nicknamed Irma Graca, the hyena of Ashvitz.

Her other nickname was the beautiful beast.

At Ashvitz, Graca started by performing telephone duties, then was transferred as a sort of light punishment to be in charge of the commando that carried stones from outside to inside the camp.

She received this punishment for not wearing her caps.

She was also in charge of the commando that built roads inside the camp and gardening work.

Awitz survivor Margaret Yastro Klug recalled, “One day I went to work.

Two SS soldiers with dogs were watching us.

One soldier put sunglasses on his dog and the girls told me about it and I looked and found it funny.

Irma came up to me and slapped me so hard I lost three teeth.

In May 1944, the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place.

During 8 weeks from May 15th to July 9th, 1944, Hungarian Johny officers under the guidance of German SS officers deported about 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Avitz Burkanau where after selection most of them were killed in the gas chambers by SS personnel.

It was in May 1944 that at age 20, Grace would become the chief guard of Berkanau’s Camp C, supervising six or seven female guards who rotated weekly.

Camp Cisted of 28 blocks where female prisoners were housed as well as other blocks such as a food block, two shops with clothes and underwear, two or three latrine blocks, and two washrooms.

Normally, the accommodation would be suitable for only 100 or at most 300 prisoners, but the camp was so overcrowded that Greece had 1,000 prisoners in each block.

In some blocks, there were bunk beds large enough for five people to sleep in.

But in most blocks, there were no beds or bunks at all.

There were about 30,000 prisoners, and since the camp was overcrowded, sanitary conditions were horrible.

The latrines stopped working and Gres would later describe it as wherever you went.

It seemed that the prisoners thought any place was good enough for a latrine.

In the camp, Greece carried her braided leather whip which was covered in cellophane so human blood could be easily washed off.

Greece later described her whip, saying, “It was a braided cellophane paper like a piglet’s braid.

It was translucent like white glass.

She stood at the door when work groups went out and came back and regularly beat the prisoners there with her whip, all for her sadistic pleasure.

She would later proudly say, “It was a very light whip, but if I hit someone with it, it would hurt.

” Imrasca beat and mistreated the prisoners so much that Yseph Kramer, the commander of Avitz Burkanau, who was also Grace’s lover, asked her to stop using it.

However, she continued to use her whip anyway.

But Kramer also abused prisoners.

As Nina Klesca later said, Greece and Kramer, they were a different breed of people.

They looked human, but these were not human people because normal people could not behave that way.

For Grace, the most frequent reasons for beating prisoners were that they had stolen food because they were hungry or that they arrived late for roll calls during which they were counted.

Nina Klesca remembered.

She made us stand for hours in horrible weather, either very cold or very hot.

People would sometimes faint.

She trampled on them.

She beat them.

She unleashed the dog.

She punished people very badly.

She was very cruel.

She was extremely cruel and tortured thousands of people.

After the war, Greece’s explanation for beating prisoners during roll calls was that they ran back and forth and she couldn’t count them properly.

Her other specialty in making these roll calls as difficult as possible was to order the prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand.

And if they failed, she beat them.

Greece’s favorite habit was beating women until they bled and fell to the ground, and then she would kick them with all the force of her heavy boots.

Greece also participated in the selections of veteran prisoners for the gas chambers with her lover Dr.

Joseph Mangallay.

They often carried out these selections together.

Holocaust survivor Alice Kahana later recalled, “When Gracie and Mangallay appeared, it was terror and fear that always meant death.

The way Irma Grace looked and walked made us all feel like we were less than animals.

” Survivors of Ashvitz remembered how during selections, prisoners were often paraded naked and inspected like cattle to determine if they were fit to work or just fit to die.

Greece was there maintaining order, and if any woman tried to escape, she would bring her back and beat her.

Prisoners knew what those selections meant and sometimes tried to run away.

However, they were brought back, horribly beaten until they bled all over and placed back in line.

A former Avitz prisoner named Chaffron recalled what happened during one such selection.

Two selected girls jumped out of a window trying to escape.

Gracie approached them as they were on the ground and killed them with two shots.

At Ashvitz, Graca had two large dogs that she kept starving.

Survivors remember seeing her riding a bicycle with the dogs at her side, escorting prisoners on their 16 km march to work.

Those who couldn’t keep up with the column.

She ordered the dogs to attack them.

On one occasion, when the female commando was carrying stones from outside into the camp, the prisoners hesitated and lost control of their wagon.

It wobbled, rolled down the hill, and overturned, scattering stones everywhere.

One survivor later testified what happened next.

Irma released the two police dogs on them.

The girls tried to escape the fangs, but the trained killers easily caught them.

The dogs were ripping the girls’ bodies apart.

Irma approached to watch what they were doing.

Her eyes were bloodshot.

The sight of blood seemed to intoxicate her.

During all of this, Irma Graca had a smile on her face.

Another of her specialties was ordering women to go outside the barbed wire fence while they were working to make it look like they were trying to escape.

Hela Copper later recalled, “While Greasie was in charge of the work detail, she always carried a rubber baton.

She was responsible for at least 30 deaths a day due to her orders to cross the fence, sometimes even more.

It was always my job, ordered by Grea, to count the dead, and I, along with other women, used to carry the bodies to one of the train wagons after the shift.

Thanks to the looting of murdered victims, Irma Gracie also had her pick of the best clothes from all over Europe.

Her dresses were tailor made by the best Jewish tailor who became prisoners in Burkanau.

And she had a special fondness for a sky blue jacket with a dark blue tie.

Irma spent hours in front of the mirror getting ready, imagining herself a movie star.

Greece once declared, “After the war, I’m going to be in the movies.

You’ll see my name as a star on the screen.

I know about life and I’ve seen many things.

I feel my experiences will be useful in my career as an artist.

” But of course, this vulgar display of arrogance couldn’t be further from the truth.

Graca left Avitz on January 18th, 1945 when Soviet forces approached the Avitz concentration camp complex, and the SS began evacuating Avitz and its sub camps.

These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as death marches.

The prisoners had to march long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.

Grace accompanied one of these forced transports from Ashvitz to Ravensbrook and from there to Bergen Bellson where she arrived along with a large number of prisoners from Ravensbrook in March 1945.

When they arrived at the camp, there was almost no food.

The daily food portion consisted of a thin soup made from various kinds of turnips cooked in water and 3.

5 cm of bread per day.

Sanitary conditions were terrible.

And in March 1945, due to starvation, thirst, and an outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily death rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300.

Holocaust survivor Diet Krauss, who was among the prisoners liberated at Bergen Belson, described seeing a group of women squatting around a pot where they had cooked a human liver.

After her arrival at Bergen Bellson, Gracie asked to remain in the camp because her lover Oberfurer France Wulfgang Hutzinger was also there.

Even at Bergen Bellson, Gracie continued mistreating prisoners who in her own words were so dirty and sick until the end.

She also forced prisoners to perform exhausting physical exercises which she called doing sports.

She later added that she herself did sports with the prisoners.

However, while she was receiving food, the women were starving and receiving almost no rations.

The previously mentioned prisoner, Saffron, recalled, “About a fortnight before the liberation of Bergen Bellson, I saw her beat a girl in the camp.

She had a pistol, but she was using a riding whip.

The beatings were very severe.

If they didn’t cause death, they weren’t considered severe.

” On the eve of the liberation, when it was clear the war was lost for Germany, Gresa bashed the heads of two sisters when she caught them trying to eat potato peels from the camp kitchen.

Although she worked in the camp for only 3 and 1/2 weeks.

She was so cruel that the prisoners nicknamed her the beast of Bellson.

Holocaust survivor Eda Treferrest recalled how after the liberation, the enraged prisoners shoved Irma Greas’s head into a toilet.

On April 17th, 1945, 2 days after the liberation of Bergen Bellson, Irma Graca was captured by British forces who forced former SS members to help bury the 13,000 bodies in mass graves.

The SS personnel were given starvation rations, were not allowed to wear gloves or other protective clothing, and were constantly cursed at, and threatened to ensure they didn’t stop working.

Within 2 months, 17 members of the staff died of typhus due to having been forced to handle the bodies without protection.

Among them was Oberarira France Wulfgang Hutzinger, Irma’s lover, who died of typhus on April 23rd, 1945.

Graa and other female SS guards were temporarily imprisoned at a Vermacht tank training school about 3 km from Bellson.

At that time when she was interviewed by an English journalist who asked why she had committed the crimes she did, Irma replied without shame.

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