Irma Grese was a sadistic nymphomaniac who slept with SS guards, participated in selecting prisoners for the gas chamber as well as exacting horrific punishment beatings
By Jaya Narain and and Richard Spillett
Daily Mail
October 30, 2017
She has gone down in history as one of the most evil and sadistic women of World War II.
Known as the Hyena of Auschwitz, Irma Grese, was one of the most feared guards at the infamous concentration camp.
A sadistic nymphomaniac who slept with SS guards, she participated in selecting prisoners for the gas chamber as well as exacting horrific punishment beatings.
Pictures of her and other other female camp guards who presided over the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews at Nazi death camps have now emerged in an archive which is going up for sale.
These vicious enforcers were rounded up when concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British army in 1945.
Three female guards were later executed for selecting hundreds of prisoners for the gas chamber and beating and murdering dozens of others.
Another woman who struck terror was Hilde Lohbauer, a mother-of-two, who was a prisoner herself but worked as a Kapo supervising forced labour.
She would target the sickest and weakest prisoners and would set savage dogs on them to tear them apart.
Another sadist and ruthless overseer feared by inmates at Bergen-Belsen was Irene Haschke who would viciously abuse female prisoners.
Grese was hanged for war crimes in 1945 while Lohbauer and Haschke both received 10 year jail sentences
All three women are among an archive of historic material compiled by British lawyer, Leo Genn, who worked as assistant prosecutor at the Belsen Trial in Luneburg in 1945 - a precursor to the Nuremberg Trials.
The archive will be sold by Toovey's auction house on October 31, when it is expected to fetch between £4,000-£6,000.
Genn later became a successful stage and film actor but kept his archive of photos and signed prisoner statements.
Seven decades the valuable historic photos and statements taken from war criminals at Bergen-Belsen is to go up for sale at the auction.
Nicholas Toovey of Toovey's auction house in Washington, Sussex, said: 'A large part of the value and its importance, is the connection with Leo Genn, the famous theatre and film actor with his role as an assistant prosecutor at the trial for Belsen.
'It includes personal items, such as his identity tags and his army-issue canvas bag, but more importantly his copies of signed witness statements and his notes made during the trial.
'The archive includes witness statements from internees of the camp and from those controlling it, revealing the horrors that went on behind closed doors, of which the world was then unaware.'
As well as the female camp guards the archive contains photos and signatures Belsen camp commandant, Josef Kramer, and Fritz Klein, a Nazi doctor who helped select prisoners for the gas chambers.
Kramer and Klein were among 11 Nazis - including three women - who were executed in December 1945 after a British military tribunal. A further nine women and two men were jailed for up to 15 years.
Genn, a lieutenant colonel, was assigned to investigate the crimes uncovered at Bergen-Belsen.
He was sent to Germany with a handful of investigators to obtain evidence from thousands of malnourished and typhus-suffering survivors of the camp.
The evidence of systematic genocide he helped uncover led to trial and execution of hundreds of Nazis after their trials at Nuremberg.
After the war he became a famous film actor was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Quo Vadis in 1951.
He appeared in several other films including Personal Affair opposite Gene Tierney in 1953 and John Huston's Moby Dick in 1956 and The Longest Day in 1962.
He was also an accomplished theatre actor and later in life he was a governor of London's The Mermaid Theatre. He died in 1978.
The archive will be sold by Toovey's auction house on October 31, when it is expected to fetch between £4,000-£6,000.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Why would anyone pay more than £1 for the photo of a Nazi concentration camp guard? But a rare photo of Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor, might bring in a bushel of euros.
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