'The beautiful beast': Why was Irma Grese evil?

‘The Beautiful Beast’: Why was Irma Grese evil? Tom Clark Abstract: Irma Grese is, perhaps, the most notorious female concentration camp guard convicted in the aftermath of WWII. Often pictured dressed in her jack-boots and high-waisted belt, she lives on in the collective memory of the public as a „paragon of evil‟. This paper explores why a relatively junior female member of the SS auxiliary service has been singled out as a key conspirator in the story of the Nazi atrocities. Using the trial transcripts from „the Belsen Trial‟ and other secondary sources that depict Grese, the paper explores her life and death, the explanations offered with respect to the engagement of the German public with the „dirty work‟ of the Nazi regime, the sexualisation of the „SS women‟, and images of evil women more generally. The paper argues that the depiction of Grese as a young „beautiful‟ and unrepentant woman, is one that symbolises extreme deviance. A narrative within a narrative, her story is constructed to transgress our gendered expectations of the atrocities of war and the extreme deviance of the Nazi regime and the SS in particular. Given the resulting collective failure to account for her involvement she similarly transgresses our expectations of explanation and thereby becomes more deviant as a result. As an image of dangerous femininity „the beautiful beast‟ also conforms to some deeply entrenched stereotypes of evil women. However, she transgresses even these myths by being seen to reject the home in favour of the state, and by occupying a position of power within a dangerous state system. Grese is a woman „out of place‟ – and the consequences of deviating from being an „angel of the house‟ are there for all to see in the lurid descriptions of her crimes, and in the collective memory of Belsen itself. Keywords: extreme deviance; sexuality; femininity; Nazi Germany; Belsen; Nazisploitation; evil Word Count: 17,309 (excluding references) Dr TOM CLARK is a Lecturer in Research Methods at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. His current interests include: the sociology of evil; methodological innovation; and, novel applications of social theory. Address: Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU. [email: t.clark@sheffield.ac.uk; phone: 0114 222 6446 ; fax: 0114 276 8125] Citation: Clark, T. (2012) „„The Beautiful Beast‟: Why was Irma Grese evil?‟ Working paper produced for the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield.  ‘The Beautiful Beast’: Why was Irma Grese evil? On Friday the 13th of December, 1945, Albert Pierrepoint placed a white cloth cap over the head of a „bonny‟ blonde haired young German woman and continued to fix a noose around her neck. „Schnell‟ she said to him as he positioned her feet on the white chalk marks atop the Hangman‟s trapdoor. Pierrepoint acquiesced and pulled the lever to the trap - the door promptly crashed down. Her lifeless body would hang motionless in the execution chamber of Hameln Gaol for the next twenty minutes before it was removed, placed in a coffin, and taken to the prison yard for burial1. At the age of 22, Irma Ilse Ida Grese, the youngest women to be executed under British law in the 20 th Century, was dead. Grese was one of thirteen prisoners executed by Pierrepoint that day, and she was one of eleven who were sentenced to death at the Belsen Trial. Pierrepoint chose to hang Grese and the two other women sentenced to death at the trial first because he did not want to subject them to „the sounds of the drop‟. The men that followed, including Josef Kramer and Dr Fritz Klien, were then hung in four pairs of two. Every Christmas for a number of years thereafter, Pierrepoint would receive a “plain envelope with a five pound note in it”. Accompanying the first, there was a scrap of paper enclosed. On it was just one word: BELSEN. Pierrepoint‟s (1974, p 145-148) account of the execution of Irma Grese has become somewhat canonical in the story of her life and death2. Tried and condemned to death at what is known as either „the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others‟ or simply „the Belsen Trial‟, she has assumed a somewhat unique position in the annals of criminal history. As one of the few women who have been popularly considered to be guilty of „crimes 1 Her remains are widely reported to have been moved in the early 1950s and reburied in the nearby Wehl Cemetery. 2 Although in a bizarre and unlikely twist on the Grese narrative, some holocaust revisionists have sought to question the veracity of Pierrepoint’s version of events. This alternative narrative – all too easily reproduced by those with an interest in the supernatural - suggests that Pierrepoint refused to conduct the hanging and when Samuel Lutzheim, a local Jewish hangman, was chosen for the task, Grese vowed to return from the dead if he touched her. When Lutzheim tried to place the rope around her neck, Grese violently resisted and had to be forcibly restrained by Lutzheim. According to the tale, the hanging was not executed properly and Grese was seen to be violently struggling at the end of the noose for up to three minutes before her body went limp. In revenge for being hung by Lutzheim, her ghost is now supposed to haunt the area that was previously occupied by Krema III in Auschwitz. against humanity‟3 , the „beautiful beast of Belsen‟ has entered into popular collective memory as one of the worst war criminals of World War II and certainly one of the most notorious. Brown (1996, p xvii) highlights that she is often cited as “being responsible for the most savage killing spree by any woman in the twentieth century” and her narrative is frequently regurgitated in pulp „true crime‟ books as an exemplar par excellence of the „evil woman‟. Alongside a seemingly very limited rogue‟s gallery of other infamous „women who kill‟, she is often taken to be a central reference point within the popular literature on mass murderers and evil women more generally. In one such example, Glyn-Jones exclaims: “She was epitome of inhuman sadism, torture beyond belief, and extravagant murder” (1996, p 231). However, she was far from the only woman convicted of war crimes at the Belsen Trial, which itself centred on two particular charges relating to the conduct of the guards at the Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps: “They were accused in the first place of having committed individually murders and other offences against the camp inmates, and in the second place of having all knowingly participated in a common plan to operate a system of ill-treatment and murder in these camps” (United Nations War Crimes Commission, 1947, p 1). Of the forty-five originally brought before the British military court, thirty of the defendants were found guilty on one or two of the charges - seventeen of those found guilty were women; fourteen were acquitted - including five women; and one defendant was removed from the trial due to illness. Alongside the death sentences for Grese, Borman, and Volkenrath: Herta Ehlert, and Helena Kopper were sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment; Ilse Forster, Herta Bothe, Irene Hasch, Gertrud Sauer, Hildegard Lobauer, Johanne Roth, Anna Hempel and Stanislawa Starotska were sentenced to ten years; Gertrude Fiest for five years, Freda Walter for three, and Hilde Lisiewitz one year. There are thought to have been as many as 3,500 women 4 who worked in the concentration camps during the war, and a variety of other so-called SS Women5 were 3 See her Wikipedia entry for a brief example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irma_Grese [last accessed 24/09/2012] 4 This commonly reported figure, though rarely referenced, is likely to be derived from Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Suhren’s suggestion that 3,500 women worked at Ravensbruck - where the women camp guards under-went initial training (Suhren was one of two men to command Ravensbruck during WWII). However, the secretive structure of the SS, and the lack of official existing documentation, makes this number difficult to verify. 5 Although these women are still referred to as ‘SS Women’, the label is, perhaps, a little misleading. Whilst women were hired by the SS, they are commonly assumed to have not been allowed to become full members. also brought to trial and imprisoned or executed at other trials in the aftermath the war. Ilse „the bitch of Buchenwald‟ Koch and Maria Mendel are perhaps two of the most infamous. Mandel, an SS-Lagerführerin 6 at Auschwitz, was sentenced to death at the first „Auschwitz Trial‟ and is popularly attributed to have been responsible of the deaths of up to 500,000 prisoners. Ilse Koch, the wife of Kamp Kommandment Karl Koch, is notorious for allegedly making selections for the gas chambers based on the tattoos she saw whilst the prisoners were awaiting selection and she is often reported to have made lampshades out the tattooed skin. Many other women, however, were also successfully prosecuted and a number were executed on account of their conduct at various concentration camps. Amongst others, Ruth Neudeck was executed for her part in the running of the gas chambers at Uckermark, a sub-camp of Ravensbruck, where over 5000 women and children are thought to have died under her authority. SS Oberaufseherin Theodora Binz was the chief wardress of the women‟s block at Ravenbruck as well as being chief training instructor for the SS women. Brown (1996, pp 33-34) reports one story of her hacking a woman prisoner to death with a pickaxe „until it was nothing more than a bloody lump. Once this matter was finished, Binz cleaned her shiny boots with the dry portion of the corpse‟s skirt‟ – all because Binz considered the woman to not be doing enough work. He goes on to suggest, „[e]ven by SS standards, Binz‟ behaviour was atrocious‟ (p 33). She was tried and executed by a British court in May 1947. Five other women, including Gerda Steinhoff, Elisabeth Becker, and the so- called „beautiful spectre‟ Jenny-Wanda Barkmann were very publically executed for their part in the regime at Stutthof7 in front of thousands at Biskupia Gorka Hill8. They are also commonly remembered for their apparent conviviality during the trial. Hermine Braunsteiner, extradited from the USA to face trial in Germany in 1973, was eventually convicted for the murder of 80 people, abetting the murder of 102 children, and collaborating in the murder of 1000 other people. Reports often claim that the German authorities regarded her as being jointly responsible for over 200,000 deaths during the war. The last trial of a female guard occurred in 1996 when Luise Danz was prosecuted for the murder of a young woman that occurred in Malchow toward the end of the war9, Technically, those women who worked in the camps were SS-Gefolge (SS-Followers) and were an auxiliary group who were reportedly paid by the government (see Brown, 1996, and Heike, 2008 for further discussion). 6 As an SS-Lagerführerin Mandel was responsible only to the camp ‘Kommanandant’. 7 Stutthof is often remembered as the ‘corpse factory’ as there is some evidence of a small-scale human soap- production factory. 8 These executions were particularly brutal. Four wooden gallows were specially constructed on a hill outside Gdansk. The accused were seemingly executed one-by-one and in full view of the crowd and their on-looking peers. However, due to the short drop, and the lack of a trapdoor – they were simply pushed from the back of the truck that was serving as a platform – many were clearly seen to struggle for some time as they hung from the gallows. 9 Danz was originally prosecuted and convicted at the original Auschwitz Trial where she was sentenced to life imprisonment – she was released in 1956. but as late as 2008, 84 year-old Elfriede Rinkel was deported from the USA after it was discovered that she had worked as a guard at Ravesbruck between June 1944 and April 194510. Perhaps with the exception of Ilse Koch, however, none have achieved the infamy of Grese. Often pictured dressed in her jack-boots and high-waisted belt, she lives on in the collective memory of the public as a „paragon of evil‟ (see „The People’, 19-09-10, for instance). Indeed, on the Wikipedia entry „Female guards in concentration camps‟ it is her „mugshot‟ that features prominently at the start of the page. The question, therefore, is why it is Irma Grese that has become symbolic of the many atrocities that the Nazi SS women were a part of? Figure 1: Irma Grese (centre) pictured alongside Josef Kramer (left) shortly after the liberation of Belsen As the often reported „worst of the SS women‟ the answer may seem obvious to many onlookers – her crimes were worse than any other. However, as the brief discussion above has suggested, there were certainly other women, and many, many other men not mentioned here, who were engaging in acts of seemingly unspeakable cruelty under the Nazi regime. Comparing their various reported crimes with the aim of classifying the „worst‟ offenders would seem to be an impossible, if not a completely misleading, 10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/21/secondworldwar.germany [last accessed, 26/09/2012] endeavour. Sofsky (1997) estimates that as many as 55,000 SS men and women did service in the concentration camps – and violence was part of the collective habitus of the guards, the absolute power of the camp demanded it from each and every member: “The compulsion to conform to the group and the constraints of camaraderie, delegation and decentralisation of power, local freedom to act, terroristic over-regulation, exoneration from responsibility by means of obedience, the iron tie to authority, the atmosphere of violence, the frustrations of training and guard duty – all these factors helped give rise to a habitus among the members of the camp SS that constituted a mortal danger to the prisoners” (Sofsky, 1997, p115). Grese‟s actions were certainly not isolated and she was not a singularly out-standing aberration of German society. But if Grese‟s actions were not substantively different to many other SS Guards why has she been remembered over-and-above other camp guards? Indeed, given the astonishingly brutal culture of the camps and the SS more generally, why has a relatively junior female member of the SS auxiliary service been singled out as being a key actor in the story of SS Women and the Nazi atrocities? The life and death of Irma Grese As Brown (1996) suggests, very little is known about Grese‟s life before she entered the concentration camps, and she appeared to live a somewhat undistinguished existence before she became an SS-Aufseherin. However, even what is known about her life as a camp-guard is largely lacking in official documentation and is mostly dependent on witness testimony. Therefore, the vast majority of the popular accounts of the early part of her life are almost inevitably derived from the Belsen Trial and the typical Grese narrative relies on the scraps of detail provided by the various affidavits and testimonies heard there. In her own testimony, Grese briefly described her background: “I was born on 7th October, 1923. In 1938 I left the elementary school and worked for six months on agricultural jobs at a farm, after which I worked in a shop in Luchen for six months. When I was 15 I went to a hospital in Hohenluchen, where I stayed for two years. I tried to become a nurse but the Labour Exchange would not allow that and sent me to work in a dairy in Fürstenberg. In July, 1942, I again tried to become a nurse, but the Labour Exchange sent me to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, although I protested against it. I stayed there until March, 1943, when I went to Birkenau Camp in Auschwitz. I remained in Auschwitz until January, 1945” (Phillips, 1949, p 248) One incident of note given in the many derivative representations of the Grese narrative was also provided by her sister‟s testimony. When asked about the likelihood of Irma beating prisoners under her charge, her sister Helene would suggest: “No. In our schooldays when, as it sometimes happens, girls were quarrelling and fighting, my sister had never the courage to fight, but on the contrary she ran away” (Phillips, 1949, p 247). Whilst this, albeit very limited, character reference would later be used by the prosecution (and beyond) to suggest that Grese was a „coward turned bully‟ (pp 255 & 260), Helene would also confirm that her mother committed suicide in 1936 and highlight that upon a visit to the Grese family home, she quarrelled with her father “because she was in the S.S.”(p 247). She did not return home again11. Grese‟s first written affidavit would confirm her history with regards to her work as an Aufseherin in various concentration camps: 11 Grese’s first deposition submitted to the Belsen Trial provides a little more detail: “I then told my father about the concentration camp and he gave me a beating and told me never to come home again” (p 711). Grese was also reported to be visibly sobbing during her sister’s testimony.  “I first went to Ravensbrück, where I was made an Aufseherin and placed in charge of female working parties consisting of about 20 prisoners. In March, 1943, I was sent to Birkenau near Auschwitz, where I remained up to January, 1945. I then went to Ravensbrück for four weeks and arrived at Belsen in March 1945” (p 711). Indeed, her life at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Belsen, is much more visible than her pre-war life. At the Belsen Trial there were a number of witnesses who testified with regards to Grese, and a number of affidavit depositions that were taken from prisoners shortly after the liberation of Belsen in April 1945 that referred to her were also submitted as evidence. These individual charges ranged from beatings, using a dog to attack and terrorise prisoners, as well as being complicit in the murder of particular individuals and the selections for the gas chambers themselves. The deposition of Gertrud Diament, for instance, suggests: “I have seen her at both camps, when in charge of working parties, beating women and girls with a stick. Her favourite habit was to beat them until they fell to the ground and then she kicked them as hard as she could with her heavy boots. She frequently caused blood to flow and, in my opinion, many of the people she injured were likely to die from such injuries, but I have no direct evidence of such deaths. Grese was also responsible for selecting victims for the gas chamber at Auschwitz” (p 660). Ilona Stein‟s deposition would further elaborate on her participation in the selections: “Whilst at Birkenau I have seen Grese making selections with Dr. Mengele of people to be sent to the gas chamber. On these parades Grese herself chose the people to be killed in this way. In one selection about August, 1944, there were between 2000 and 3000 selected. At this selection Grese and Mengele were responsible for selecting those for the gas chamber. People chosen would sometimes  sneak away from the line and hide themselves under their beds. Grese would go and find them, beat them until they collapsed and then drag them back into the line again” (p 747). Stein‟s testimony would also suggest that Grese beat her on one occasion and, countering the suggestion by the defence that they were „light blows‟, Stein would confirm “[t]he general procedure was a real proper beating” (p 100). Dora Szafran would corroborate their brutality: “The beatings were very severe. If they were not the cause of death they were not called severe in the camp” (p 85). Szafran would also directly accuse Grese of murder: “the prison doctor, made a selection for the gas chamber, and two selected girls jumped out of the window and Grese approached them as they were lying on the ground and shot them twice” (p 90). Edith Trieger would similarly state that Grese shot a Hungarian women „through the left breast‟ for not being in her block when a selection was taking place (p 690)12. Ilona Stein‟s deposition would further describe her position of command at Auschwitz, and that she was capable of using it to facilitate murder: “...at one of these selection parades, one Hungarian woman who had been selected tried to escape from the line and join her daughter in another line which was for those not chosen. Grese noticed this and ordered one of the S.S. guards to shoot the woman, which he did. I did not hear the order, but I saw Grese speak to the guard and he shot at once…I took her body to the mortuary” (p 747) Similarly, with regard to her dog, the deposition of Hanka Rozenwayg would suggest Grese had an ability to follow orders with ruthless efficiency: 12 Grese would later not deny that ‘the woman had been shot, but I do deny that it was me’. She then suggested that a woman in Camp ‘C’ had been shot by a watch-tower guard, but she could not remember if it was the same woman (p 252).  “I was employed digging ditches outside the camp. Whilst so employed I laid down my shovel for a rest, and Lothe, who was in charge of my working party, saw me. I saw her go to the woman S.S. guard and I heard her ask the S.S. woman to set her dog on me. I recognize this S.S. woman as No. 2, on photograph Z/4/2. I did not know her name, but have since been told that it is Irma Grese. Grese set her dog on to me and as a result I was bitten by the dog on my right shoulder. I still have a scar on my shoulder where the dog bit me. I was made to continue working and I had to dress the wound myself after I had returned to my block” (p 746). Gitla Dunkleman‟s deposition would again underline Grese‟s propensity to act brutally: “I have seen this woman commit many acts of brutality when we were paraded before her at Appell or for the selection of working parties. I have seen her strike women about the face and body with a rubber truncheon and kick them. I have seen her draw blood and knock women senseless. I have heard her order that the women should be left unattended on the ground. These parades lasted from 2 to 3 hours. These acts were committed for not standing still at the parade or other trivial matters. If a person collapsed out of weakness she would kick and beat them. She was the worst of the women S.S” (p 661). In her own defence testimony, Grese‟s response to these accusations was surprising. Whilst she would largely deny the particular individual charges, unlike some other the other defendants at the Belsen trial she did not attempt to deny the harsh reality of the camps and would somewhat brazenly admit to her complicity in the regime. Indeed, it is clear from her testimony that Grese was fully indoctrinated into the brutal culture of the camps, which she herself recognised. This sometimes even included inflicting punishment on other SS Guards. In her testimony she highlighted how “Kommandant Hoess ordered me to give [an SS Woman] the last two of the 25 strokes with which she was punished by the order of Reichsführer Himmler. I was then 20” (p 250). But it was not just the punishment of SS Guards for disobeying orders that she admitted to participating in and she was very open about the fact that she carried a whip at Auschwitz, and why she did so. She commented that it was “made out of cellophane...It was a very light whip, but if I hit somebody with it, it would hurt. After eight days Kommandant Kramer prohibited the whips, but we nevertheless went on using them. I never carried a rubber truncheon” (p 249). Later she would admit to beating prisoners against regulations, and instructing others in her command to beat prisoners despite not having the authorisation to do so. Her final deposition would state: “I did, in fact, always have a whip which I used consistently whenever necessary.... I admit that there was also a walking- stick...which, although it was unauthorized, we frequently used to beat prisoners. I usually used to beat them on the shoulders, but there were times when, because of the numbers involved, they were beaten on any part of the body that happened to be easiest” (p 713) She would also later make the rather contrary clarification, “I have beaten prisoners, but I have not ill-treated them” (p 260). However, she would dispute the suggestion that this was done „regularly‟ (p 259), or that she enjoyed it (p 255). Grese also admitted to supervising the roll-calls within which Dr Josef Menegle would make the selection for the gas chambers, although she denied making the selections herself (p 251-252). Elsewhere, whilst she refuted that other Apell parades would go on for hours, she did highlight that “[e]xtra parades and extra drills are a recognized form of punishment in the German service” (p 252) and that they would run for “an hour, or perhaps it might have been two hours. When I said before, three or four hours, that was an exception” (p 258). However, she did clearly deny being in charge of a dog or setting one upon the prisoners – “As I had no dog I could not set it upon Rozenwayg” (p 255); she flatly denied shooting anyone - “I never shot at all at anyone” (p 251); and she also firmly denied that she had ever tricked (non German-reading) prisoners into crossing a wire so that they would be shot for entering a prohibited zone, defiantly proclaiming “You can think what you like, but it is a lie, and it is wrong” (p 254). Denying another charge, she would also argue that she “did not beat so many women that I would not be able to remember” (p 259). She would also refute being „the worst SS woman in the camp‟, retorting: “Yes, they say so. They are all lying. These people exaggerated and made an elephant out of a small fly” (p 259). In spite of these denials and accusations of lying, in his summing up of the case for the prosecution Colonel Backhouse noted just how open Grese had been: “She is quite frank about it, and on her own admissions alone I would suggest that at Auschwitz there is ample evidence to show she was ill-treating, beating and prolonging Appelle. Then she comes to Belsen and is made Arbeitsdienstfiührerin, and again you have stories as to how she beat people. She stood at the gate beating them, she beat girls working in the kitchen, and she beat and beat people and made them do sport” (p 616). In his summing-up, the Judge Advocate also commentated on the “tremendous amount of evidence” against her, adding that her admission of her role of the selections was one of “great frankness” (Playfair and Sington, 1957, p 179). For Derrick Sington, who was called as a witness at the Trial and would later write a commentary on the trial, it was not a surprise that Grese was found guilty, or that she was sentenced to death. It seemed certain that she was guilty as “the evidence of cruelty on her part was considerable; and she herself had provided some corroboration of it‟, including her own involvement in the „selections‟” (Playfair and Sington, 1957). He goes on to argue that this is the single most damaging piece of evidence against her with reference to her capital sentence as all those on trial who had taken part in the parading for selections at Auschwitz were ultimately sentenced to death and executed. However, the case for the prosecution at the trial was very carefully controlled, as Playfair and Sington (1957) noted: „in the interrogations carried out at Belsen....a serious effort had been made to observe standards in selecting witnesses...[and] the investigators were experienced lawyers and policemen who knew that  the case they prepared for the prosecution would have to stand up in a court that would be adhering pretty closely to normal English legal procedure...Scores of the ex-inmates at Auschwitz and Belsen who volunteered evidence were rejected as unreliable because of obviously wild statements or hysterical attitudes‟ (p 161). The implication would appear to suggest that accusations made in court were somewhat restrained – the tip of the Irma Grese iceberg. Indeed, one report at the time of the trial (Newsweek, 01-10-1945) suggested that “this 100-pound German girl invented new methods of torture. One of them: She waited until a pregnant woman was ready to give birth, then tied her legs together and watched the agony." Evidently, this does not appear in the trial transcript, and there is no corroboration within the article itself. However, it did point toward the increasingly sexualised narratives of torture that would appear after the trial. In particular two „eye-witness‟ testimonies would enter into the collective memory as central points of focus of the Grese narrative. The first was given by Dr Giselle Perl, an inmate doctor, in her autobiographical account of her own experiences at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Going much further than the accusations presented at the Belsen Trial, Perl accuses Grese of purposefully inflicting wounds upon the breasts of inmates so that she could masturbate at the sight of the resulting surgical procedure: “[Grese] went around in camp, her bejewelled whip poised, picked out the most beautiful young women and slashed their breast open with the braided wire end of her whip. Subsequently those breasts got infected by the lice and dirt which invaded every nook and corner of the camp. They had to be cut open, if the patient was to be saved. Irma Greze [sic] invariably arrived to watch the operation, kicking the victim if her screams interfered with her pleasure and giving herself completely to the orgiastic spasms which shook her entire body and made saliva run down from the corner of her mouth” (Perl, 1948, p 62). She would also add that she was forcibly made her carry out an abortion on Grese, by Grese herself. Knowing that to touch a German officer was an offence punishable by death for a Jew, she duly complied knowing that refusal would similarly result in certain death at the hands of Grese. Indeed, Perl suggests that after the (successful) abortion Grese threatened to kill her anyway with Grese apparently commenting: “You are a good doctor...What a pity you have to die. Germany needs good doctors” (p 64). Olga Lengyel‟s (1948) auto-biographical account of life as a prisoner in Auschwitz is, in all probability, the source for much of the accepted information concerning Grese and her frequently sensationalistic13 account would also graphically suggest that Grese was using her position in the camp to gain sexual gratification from those under her authority. Lengyel, an inmate Doctor and apparently a friend of Grese‟s house-maid and dress- maker, suggests that Grese „was bisexual‟ (p 193) and had repeated homosexual encounters with prisoners during her time at Auschwitz. Homosexuality was, of course, a serious moral charge at the time. Unconstrained by the legal requirements of the Trial, Lengyel would add that when she eventually tired of them, she would send them to the selections for the gas chambers (p 193). Lengyel would also accuse Grese of taking heterosexual lovers too – although she would counter-point this narrative with a particularly brutal tale of Grese‟s conduct toward them. Spying through the cracks in the wood of one of the huts, Lengyel would suggest that Grese, having her amorous advances turned down by a „handsome Georgian‟ whose good looks had been commented upon throughout the camp, Grese made him watch her brutally beat his lover whilst naked: “She was in a dreadful state. Red welts extended across her face and below the opening of her bosom. The sadistic SS had spared not even her face….I never saw the handsome Georgian again. The beautiful 13 For instance, like Perl, Lengyel recounts an episode in which an inmate Doctor (unnamed) is coerced into performing an abortion on Grese, with the help of Lengyel, who then goes on to describe the procedure: “What a picture we saw! Irma Greise *sic+, the torturess, was actually sweating from fear. She trembled and groaned and was unable to control herself ...[and] could not endure the slightest pain without whining. No sooner was the operation over than she began to prattle. ‘After the war, I intend to go into pictures. You will see my name in lights on the marquee. I know life and I’ve seen a great deal. My experiences will be useful in my artistic career’” (Lengyel, 1948, p 157).  beast had him shot. The girl? ...Griese [sic] had had her sent to the Auschwitz brothel” (Lengyel, 1948, pp 196-197). After the incident, Lengyel claims that Grese calmly tried on the clothes that Lengyel and her dress-maker were delivering – stopping only to deliver a blow, whilst naked, to the dress-maker for protesting at some of her demands. The accusations of Grese‟s rampant sexuality would continue and she is often reported to have also had an intimate relationship with the most notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Over fifty years after the supposed liaison, one (typical) report in British newspaper would suggest “[s]he had a reputation as a nymphomaniac who sexually abused male and female prisoners. Among her many lovers was brutal camp physician Josef Mengele” (The Mirror, 21-11-2005). The source of evidence for this union, a veritable „match made in hell‟, is likely to come from Lengyel – as it is for her alleged affair with Josef Kramer: “The „angel‟ with the pure face had many love affairs. In the camp it was gossiped that Kramer and Dr Mengerle [sic] were her chief lovers. But her greatest affair was with an SS engineer whom she frequently met in the evenings” (Lengyel, 1948, p 156). There seems to be general agreement that there was a high degree sexual promiscuity between the SS Guards and the SS women but the evidence that would support an assertion that this extended to a relationship between Grese and Mengele appears to be limited to hear-say. However, at the Belsen Trial, it was established that Grese had asked Kramer for permission to stay at Belsen to be with another SS man: „I got to know an S.S. man in Auschwitz who was transferred to Belsen, and that is the reason why I wanted to stay‟. The man in question is now considered to be Oberscharführer Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger. He occupied a senior construction position at Auschwitz until Jan 1945 where upon he was transferred to Belsen. He died of typhus on the 23rd of April 1945. Both Isabella Leitner (1978, p 41-45) and Kitty Hart would write biographies that appear to support (or reproduce) the sexualised parts of Lengyel‟s narrative. However, these were published a long time after the cessation of hostilities, in 1978 and 1981 respectively, by which time the more sensational parts of the Grese narrative were well entrenched and the extent to which these testimonies provide reliable evidence is questionable. Elsewhere, three lamp shades fashioned from human skin are commonly reported to have been found in Grese‟s living quarters. The account of this discovery offered in the Guardian newspaper is typical: "The skins of three inmates that she [Irma Grese] had had made into lampshades were found in her hut" (the Guardian, 21-11- 2005). Similarly, in a commentary on famous cases of „women who kill‟ offered by Gerald Sparrow, a former Judge, he claims: “In her own house Irma had had the skins of three victims made into the most attractive lampshades, because she discovered that human skin, though it was tough and durable, also let light through in a most pleasing way.” Sometimes the story includes reference to other items made from human skin, including, book covers (usually Mein Kampt), gloves, and handbags. However, the original source of the evidence for these items is inevitably unreferenced. Indeed, given that Grese is also often given the moniker „the bitch of Belsen‟ – a name that is all too easily compared to the „bitch of Buchenwald‟ Ilse Koch - it is possible that the two narratives are being conflated and confused. Like Grese, Ilse Koch is also commonly perceived to have abused prisoners for her own sexual gratification. However, whilst there is a tangible source for the discovery of human lamp shades at Koch‟s Buchenwald residence 14 , and some supporting evidence that suggests that some members of the Nazi regime were collecting and experimenting with human skin in a number of ways (see Przyrembel, 2001), there appears to be little direct primary evidence of Grese‟s direct involvement or any collection of artefacts. Accounting for evil: Explaining the evil of the Nazi war criminals Partly because of the limited evidence concerning her life, and the fact that some of the later accusations are based on uncorroborated and relatively isolated eye-witness testimonies, it is possible to question the veracity of some of the more sensational charges against her. However, as Playfair and Sington (1957) highlight, there is little doubt that Irma Grese was guilty of willingly participating in the brutal culture of the concentration camps, and the SS more generally. As Phillips (1949, p xli) suggests, “though some of the more lurid allegations against her may not be borne out by the evidence, there are enough, and more than enough, which stand uncontroverted”. Indeed, she herself did not deny her involvement or her often brutal treatment of prisoners. Within the popular narrative of her life, therefore, the question then quickly becomes what made Grese susceptible to such a culture, and why was she evil? 14 Whether Ilse Koch was involved directly involved in the collection of human skin or not is still open to question. The charges against her in this respect were dropped during her second trial (see Przyrembel, 2001, for further discussion). In spite of the tendency to label the concentration camp SS Guards as pathological, the vast majority of research has generally suggested otherwise. Indeed, according to Waller (2007, p 62), for many mental health professionals assigned to assess those awaiting trial at Nuremburg, the question was not whether they would find psychological disturbance in the accused, but how much. The actions of the Nazi high command necessarily and essentially made them different to „normal‟ people; the job of the Allied doctors and psychologists at Nuremburg was simply to discover this difference. However, according to Douglas Kelley – one of the psychiatrists who interviewed those accused – “such personalities are not unique or insane [and] could be duplicated in any country of the world today” (c.f. Harrower, 1976, p76). Given the knowledge that was emerging in post-war Europe about the Nazi atrocities, the expectation that these people were somehow different was an attractive one, and it is unsurprising that Kelley et al‟s findings were largely kept from public consumption: “it is more comforting to believe that no „normal‟ or „healthy‟ person would be able to engage in such atrocities against humanity. It makes it easier for us to distance ourselves from the Nazi atrocities by regarding all perpetrators as inherently evil, psychopathic killers” (Waller, 2007, p 62). Indeed, Waller also highlights that Ruldoph Hess, private secretary to Hitler and the third ranking Nazi official, preyed upon the idea of the „Mad Nazi‟ in order to try and commute his punishment. By reading novels in court during his trial hearing, imitating a mad stare, pretending to be unaware of the court proceedings, and rocking back and forth whilst the verdict was read out, Waller argues that Hess was feigning insanity - or at least incompetence to stand trial - and was cynically trying to take advantage of the general perception that only „pathological‟ people could have implemented these atrocities. Hess was effectively exploiting lay explanations and expectations of evil people to avoid a life sentence. Similarly, reports that a post-mortem of Robert Ley‟s brain revealed “a long standing degenerative process of the frontal lobes” confirmed “the wide-spread notion that the Nazi atrocities could be relegated to abnormal, diagnosable conditions – even something as quantifiable as „brain damage‟” (Waller, 2007, p 62). The fact that a later report suggested that his brain was not as abnormal as these earlier reports indicated, slipped by largely unnoticed. Our everyday assumptions about the SS Guards who engaged with the dirty work of the concentration camps are also often compromised by the „banality of evil‟. Arendt, for example, famously suggested that the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann was not a monstrous figure, but a relatively tedious and banal one. Similarly, Lifton (1986, p 5) carried out an extensive study of the medical doctors who worked at the concentration camps and conceded “participation in mass murder need not require emotions as extreme or demonic as would seem appropriate.” Nils Christie‟s study of prison guards is also instructive. Dividing camp guards into two groups, the first was composed of those who prisoners thought were bad and dangerous and who were later prosecuted whilst the second, a control group, who were viewed more favourably by prisoners and who were not prosecuted, Christie sought to compare their characteristic differences using a number of tests. He found little to differentiate the „bad‟ group from the control group. Whilst the dangerous guards were more likely to view the prisoners as inhumane, less able to empathise with them, and were more likely to be scared of them, he concluded: “other youths could have become like them if they were in the same situation and exposed for the same pressure” (Christie, 1952, p 60). More generally, Milgram‟s (1963) „shocking experiments‟ would later highlight the susceptibility of any individual to act obediently to authority, and Asch‟s (1956) studies of conformity would suggest the remarkable power of group sentiment in even the most of banal situations. Zimbardo et al‟s (1973) equally infamous prison experiment at Stanford would similarly demonstrate just how easily it is for people to act with increasing brutality in an assumed role. Such insights into the machinations of the holocaust have led some to make a rather uncomfortable assertion. Evil is not something that other people do, it‟s something that we all could do. As Darley concludes (1992, p 204): “[M]any evil actions are not the volitional products of individual evildoers. Instead, they are in some sense societal products, in which a complex series of social forces interact to cause individuals to commit multiple acts of stunning evil”. Darley goes on to highlight that it is organisations themselves that create and maintain sustained evil – killing organisations produce those who are killed, and those that kill. Therefore, it was the over-arching structure of Nazi concentration camps, and the wider state, that required SS doctors and guards to select those that would enter the camp for labour and those that would enter for death. This structure, as Darley points out, existed whether any particular doctor or guard participated or not and, in a place where life was extraordinarily tenuous, the option of not participating would have taken tremendous courage. Therefore, the problem for many of the doctors and guards was not whether they would participate, but how they would cope with rationalising the process. However, as both Lifton and Darley highlight, once they had learned to cope with this situation, some could then begin to operate with greater efficiency as the norms of the camp began to take over the more established norms of wider society that they were used to operating in. The camp effectively became a hermetically sealed micro-society that had its own local moral framework that could be used to make sense of their actions and even use it to assess and improve their work. Indeed, whilst the brutal actions of the S.S. within various concentration camps remain shocking for contemporary audiences, sociological approaches to deviance have long demonstrated that “[d]eviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behaviour; it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them” (Erikson, 1962, p 308). Deviance does not occur due to individual or pathological malfunction, but is instead relative to the context within which an action or actor is observed. Given that such barbaric conduct was an everyday occurrence within the immediate confines of the camps, the actions of Grese and others were not deviant in the context of the everyday habitus of the SS guards (see Sofsky, 1997). Perversely perhaps, to not conform to the barbarity that Rudolf Hoss would later refer to as a „cult of severity‟ and the „Dachau spirit‟, would have actually been more deviant for an SS Guard within the confines of the camp. Given the imposing modernistic administrative bureaucracy that had completely rationalised and socialised Nazi ideology within the State, the reality of the individual to choose to directly resist the wider Nazi regime must also have been very difficult. Although much of the later academic discussion of Nazi women has oscillated between a discussion of Nazi women being victims or perpetrators (see Schwarz, 2002, for example), born in 1923 and just ten years old when the Nazi‟s came to power, Irma Grese was fully socialised within the Nazi machine and, as Playfair and Sington (1957) note, she would have had little choice about whether she would engage with the regime. Despite her sister‟s suggestions that they had never been a part of the Nazi League of German Maidens (the Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM), membership was made automatic in 1936 and the romantic mythology of the countryside and those who worked upon the Fatherland that was espoused in such meetings must have been an appealing vision for an impressionable young farmer‟s daughter. Similarly, her stint as an assistant nurse at Hohenlychen in the late 1930s, a special hospital for the Waffen SS where decorated soldiers and other high-ranking Nazi leaders stayed to recuperate, would have brought her within close proximity to some of the most important men in Germany at that time. Heydrich, Hess, and Streicher are all reported to have stayed there for „toning-up‟. Working under Professor Karl Gebhardt15, commonly reported as being a school-friend of Himmler and an original participant in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the experience must have been a hugely influential one. Beyond her early experiences of the Nazi State, Playfair and Sington also suggest that within the confines of the concentration camp it is unlikely that it would ever have occurred to Grese that she could disobey orders either. On top of her wider conditioning, brutality was being institutionally reinforced. In her testimony she herself noted how she, aged just twenty, had punished a disobedient colleague (Phillips, 1948, p 250). Similarly, Herta Ehlert also related at the Belsen trial how she had been transferred from a camp in Poland to Ravenbruck because she had been „too great familiarity with the prisoners, not being severe enough with them‟ (p 227), and, as Playfair and Sington (1957) argue, to be downgraded from wardress to prisoner was not so rare within the concentration camps. It is unsurprising, therefore, that just like many of those charged with war crimes who used a „cog-in-the-machine‟ defence, Grese also recognised the difficulty of resisting the Nazi ideology, or the brutality within the camps. Inevitably, she did this more candidly than most: “I remember saying in the first statement I made to an English [British] officer that "Himmler is responsible for all that has happened, but I suppose I have as much guilt as all the others above me." I meant by this that simply by being in the S.S, and seeing the crimes committed on orders from those in authority and doing nothing to protest or stop them being committed makes anybody in the S.S. as guilty as anybody else. The crimes I refer to are the gassing of persons at Auschwitz and the killing of thousands at Belsen by starvation and disease. I consider the crime to be murder” (Phillips, 1948, p 712) 15 Gebhardt was later executed at Landsberg in 1948 for the human experiments he would go onto perform at Hohenlychen. But it is not only her apparent willingness to admit her guilt that is made to stand out from the others present at Belsen and elsewhere. The Grese narrative is also one that has become highly personalised, and highly individualised. As is often the case with famous criminals, and far over and above other SS Guards at Belsen, much biographical detail is typically presented in the narratives of her case that allows us to „see‟ her with more focus. There has even been one biography (c.f. Brown, 1996). But regardless of its inconclusivity, there does seem reason enough to mention her life pre-war in detail. Indeed, unlike others present at the Belsen trial there is a whole section on her „Background‟ in her Wikipedia entry. Her mother‟s suicide is a central point of reference of (undefined) significance, as is her failure to become a nurse, which itself is often taken to be evidence of her lack of education16. Despite the fact that the year of duty and the RAD/wJ (see below) meant that many young German woman would find themselves in a series of different employment contexts – just as the youth of today does – something is made of Grese‟s inability to „hold down a job‟. Similarly, she is often portrayed as being „bullied‟ by her class-mates, and was „fanatical‟ in her support for the Bund Deutscher Madel, „League of German Girls‟. In comparison, details of the lives of Bormann, Volkenrath and others are largely anonymous pre-war. Whilst the biographical detail of any individual is likely to rise exponentially according to their perceived infamy, the presence of an individualised narrative does necessarily heighten the uniqueness of the biographee. The problem here, however, that the ordinariness of her background is self-fulfilling and even amplifies her extremely deviant identity. Because of her evil status, there is a collective expectation that there is something equally pathological in her up-bringing. Although all sorts of biographical details get caught up in an emerging deviancy amplification spiral – she is deviant, therefore we will find other deviant things about her - when, somewhat inevitably, nothing conclusive or particularly remarkable is found it transgresses our expectations regarding explanations of deviance and is thereby more deviant as a result. There is no easy explanation that can be clearly identified in her biography and this, in turn, adds to her status as being evil. 16 A popular, if forgotten, explanation for the involvement of those implicated in the worst atrocities was that they were, in part, un-educated. This narrative was strongly repeated within the explanation of Playfair and Sington (1957). However, although the Irma Grese narrative usually omits wider acknowledgement of the complex role of women in the Third Reich, the image of Irma Grese as evil cannot be understood without placing it within the wider gendered narratives of war-time Nazi Germany. Whilst she is presented as something of a unique figure, she was certainly was not alone in her complicity and there were many women in the SS Auxilliary service and beyond who were engaging with the various structures of the regime. Irma Grese and the ‘dirty work’ of Nazi Germany Already well established within the Third Reich, the Pflichtjahr - the year of duty - was made compulsory in 1938 and any un-married woman seeking work was obligated to first complete a year of un-paid employment, usually as a farm-hand or in domestic service. Similarly, by 1941 the Reichsarbeitsdient – weibliche Jugend (RAD/wJ) also co- opted young women into a „Reich Labour Service for Female Youth‟ – something of an equivalent to military service for men. With the entrenchment of hostilities on the Western and Eastern fronts, and the drain on resources that thereby ensued, a further requirement meant that the civic duties of single Aryan women would include an additional six-month Auxiliary War Service (see Heineman, 2003). According to Schwarz (p121-122), the result of these policies meant that Nazi women increasingly found themselves involved in areas of crucial military support work, such as manning anti- aircraft guns, or assisting with administrative requirements of the efforts on the front line. By the time of the devastating Allied air-raids of 1944, married women were also being heavily conscripted for the war effort and toward the cessation of hostilities some even found themselves building anti-tank lines across the German boarders. Other women were also directly involved in the forceful deportations of Jews from Poland, and Schwartz (2002) and Koontz (1986) provide much evidence to that suggest that many willingly relished the opportunity to contribute to the Fatherland in all areas of the German wartime experience. Whilst this engagement could result in a civilian job with the public transport service or as a nurse or worker in the local hospitals and factories, for some it meant a direct engagement with the „dirty work‟ of the concentration camps 17. 17 Heinke (2008) highlights that some of the SS Women, attracted by the relatively good wages, the promise of welfare related work, and the offer employment in the public service, would have actually applied to work in the labour camps, rather being referred by the labour exchange. She also highlights that applications were common from those who had worked in domestic service and/or welfare settings, both of which applied to Grese. It is unclear whether Grese actually applied or was referred, although in her own testimony Grese does suggest: “In July, 1942, I tried again to become a nurse, but the Labour Exchange sent me to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, although I protested against it” (Phillips, 1948, p 248). Evertt C. Hughes defines „dirty work‟ as the work of a society that is either physically, socially, or morally tainted: “It may be simply physically disgusting. It may be a symbol of degradation, something that wounds one's dignity. Finally, it may be dirty work in that it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions (Hughes, 1951: 319).” Hughes contends that the people who perform dirty work have the potential to become stigmatised because they handle the work of a society that is distasteful and disgusting to the rest. Although other members of society may applaud, simply recognise, or ignore the contribution that the work gives to society, the presence of dirty workers allows non-polluted members of society to go about their daily lives and continue to regard themselves as „clean‟. To use Goffman‟s terminology, the dirty worker is then always potentially socially discreditable by those who do not engage directly with the work. In certain contexts this difference can lead to an irrevocably spoiled identity for the dirty worker – an identity so stigmatised that it becomes the master status of the individual concerned. Whilst the business of war inevitably provides all sides with seemingly necessary dirty work, the problem for the SS guards and the wider members of post-war Germany was that when the camps were liberated and the habitus of the SS machine evaporated, the values of a more normative humanity were re-imposed. In this new context, their actions within the concentration camps were now radically deviant. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the war this extreme deviance was continually being reinforced by repeated revelations of the German atrocities – many of which were being relayed to the German public via British Public Information films that were being shown to them specifically to demonstrate what they had been a part of. The German populace was irrevocably associated with a regime that was increasingly being labelled as evil. As many Germans had been directly involved with the war effort, some onlookers, and various other members of the Allied victors - not to mention some Germans themselves - were asking difficult questions about their complicity. Indeed, as Evert Hughes himself was later to ask: “How could such dirty work be done among and, in a sense, by the millions of ordinary, civilized German people?...How and where could there be found in a modern civilised country the several hundred thousand men and women capable of such work?” (Hughes, 1951, p 25). With so many people potentially discreditable – and even prosecutable - because of their involvement and complicity with the dirty work of the Third Reich, the question for the German people as individuals and as a nation was how to (re)present themselves as „clean‟ and avoid the stigma of the Nazi party. Of course, the chaos of the after-math of the war provided many with the opportunity to slip away into the rubble of post-war Germany. Given that much of the dirty work of the Third Reich was conducted in secret, many had ample opportunity. Citing the work of Kogon, Hughes suggests that „the Nazis came to power by creating a state within a state‟, but „even as a movement, it had inner circles; each sworn to secrecy as against the next outer one‟, and at the centre the SS, which went „beyond all danger of interference and investigation‟ because „it was the instrument of interference and investigation‟ (1951, p 33). These concentric circles of secrecy and operation therefore, allowed the German people and the Allied forces, who were both struggling to cope with the administrative requirements of post-war Germany, to assume a position of what Coser (1969) terms the „denial of visibility‟ with respect to many of those who carried out the dirty work: „as long as such knowledge did not directly intrude on their perceptual field, the public remained unconcerned‟ and all but the most visible faces of the regime were largely unknown. Only the diligence and determination of so-called „Nazi-hunters‟, and a good deal of serendipity, would result in some of them eventually being tracked down. At the time, however, given the lack of visibility, and the fact that the SS and others scrupulously destroyed evidence, which included witnesses, many of those „evil-doers‟ who had engaged with the dirty work could remain relatively anonymous. Heinke (2008) estimates that criminal proceedings were initiated against just 10% of female guards, with many never actually coming to trial because of the death of the accused, or the „absence of proof‟: “the majority of a total of over 3,000 former guards received light sentences or were not convicted at all. Most of them lived unmolested in the Federal Republic of Germany” (p 137). More generally, the „denial of visibility‟ that resulted from the chaos of post-war Germany provided an opportunity for the wider populace of German women to revert from being „Nazi women‟ back to their more maternal, and socially acceptable, roles. According to Schwarz (2002, p 122): “[the] „women in uniform‟ and the Nazi activists and party members, „the perpetrators, followers and bystanders‟ had shucked off their past and been transformed into innocent women, women whose whole existence was devoted to loving their husbands and children  and who had lived their lives in the private sphere of the family and were not responsible for the dictatorship or Nazi crimes” Like Koontz (1986) before her, Schwarz argues that those complicit with the Nazi system were able to use their relative anonymity to collectively recast their memory as one of sacrifice, suffering and exertion in the face of the absence of their men. The high-water mark of which was the Trumerfrau – the „women of the rubble‟ who cleared away the debris in the aftermath of the war that paved the way for the reconstruction of Germany. Indeed, the Trumerfrau were institutionally required by the Allied powers to assist with the clean-up, and were increasingly depicted in the public information films as „mending‟ and „nurturing‟ a broken Germany. Collectively forgetting their immediate past, it was these women who were effectively engaged in the work of home-making, albeit on a national scale, to re-build their defeated country. It was undoubtedly effective and Hannah Adrent would comment on the apparent lack of collective memory of the holocaust in all this re-building (1950, p 342): “nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself.... And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of refugees in their midst.... The average German looks for the causes of the last war not in the acts of the Nazi regime, but in the events that lead to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Such an escape from reality is also, of course, an escape from responsibility”. This collective ignorance allowed the identity of the „Nazi women‟ to mutate into a relatively anonymous lump of maternal and nurturing Trumerfrau. However, these images contrasted heavily with a group of „dirty workers‟ who were increasingly being singled out for attention in the post-war public information films that were being shown in the UK and Germany – the SS Women. As Weckel (2005, p 561) highlights,  “Commentaries on films and captions for photographs were to guide the viewers‟ interpretation, mostly assuring them that these people might look ordinary but were indeed extraordinarily cruel and evil. To arouse viewers‟ distrust in their often unspectacular appearances seemed to be easier when the pictures showed female perpetrators. The sight of them was relatively unusual and for many, unexpected”. But not only did the representations of the SS Women in the immediate aftermath of the war contrast with the Trumerfrau, they were also directly juxtaposed, and inexorably linked, with the harrowing images of the liberation of Belsen. Weckel‟s is a particularly evocative description of the horror: “Some inmates on the verge of starvation are shown being helped to walk a few stumbling steps, the camera recording their pitiful movements. They have been stripped naked for demonstration purposes, while the helpers supporting them remain clothed: a situation that, however self-evident, intensifies an impression of the survivors as objects entirely lacking in autonomy, unable to protest treatment beyond their control. Their nakedness, however, reveals more than catastrophic malnutrition. These bodies, to which the term „walking skeletons‟ has often been applied, hardly show any distinguishing characteristics: their heads have all been shaved; their age cannot be estimated; their genitals are so withered that their sex cannot be classified; their body gestures express only weakness; their emaciation is far too pronounced to make out individual facial features” (2005, p 554) If the sight of a „living dead‟ were not shocking enough, the show-reels would also refuse to look away from the actual dead too: “the documentaries contain images of fields and mounds of corpses, corpses in open mass graves and on trucks. Often it is quite  impossible to make out which parts of the body belonged to which contorted corpse. The takes regularly change between panning shots to stress the huge number of corpses and medium close-ups that show most of them as mutilated. Sometimes the camera captures individuals in close-up, generally of the head, lingering briefly in a „frozen image‟. Most of the dead bodies are naked, which is a distressing sight per se since in most societies the deceased are covered and their eyes closed as soon as possible” (2005, p 552) It is of little surprise, therefore, that Belsen and the shocking images of bodies being bull-dozed into „corpse pits‟ has etched itself into the collective memory, as one commentary recently described it: „...the film footage taken at Belsen concentration camp became so ingrained in British popular culture that it‟s name became a synonym for the worst examples of Nazi inhumanity – a connotation that remains just as strong to this day‟18. Coser (1969, p 103) argues that a common technique of „othering‟ evil people is not only to disallow them the denial of invisibility, but also to encourage a form a „publically sanctioned seeing‟. Typically, this „othering‟ denies them a common humanity – those that carry out the worst of the „dirty work‟ are not really like us and they do not share, nor deserve, the sense of sympathy which we extend to people like „us‟. This was clearly the case for the SS women who found themselves woven into the narratives that accompanied the horrific images of Belsen. Alongside the anonymity of the German populace generally and the growing images of the Trumerfrau, the SS Women were clearly framed to be visibly deviant in the extreme – they were portrayed as: “...women so wicked that they turned the gender order upside down. Far from today‟s studies of „ordinary men‟, „ordinary women‟ and „ordinary Germans‟, most contemporaries preferred to imagine the executioners of such extraordinary crimes as themselves extraordinary, hence categorically different from the rest of mankind.” (Weckel, 2005, p560) 18 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/liberation_camps_01.shtml This publically sanctioned seeing was quickly concentrated on those individual SS women who had been singled out for prosecution in the immediate after-math of the war. Indeed, by creating a group of identifiable outsiders, the Belsen and Nuremberg Trials focussed the public gaze on a select band of dirty workers. Albert Pierrepoint summed up the gravity of responsibility that he felt amongst all of this publically sanctioned seeing: “Because of what people felt about Belsen, and because they saw me as, in a way, their own stand-in avenger, not only for the wrongs of the SS but for all their grief at the deaths in this long war” (1974, p 141). However, not only did all this publically sanctioned seeing allow the ordinary civilians of Britain and the rest of Europe an identifiable focus for their own frustrations, anger, and grief, the trials also allowed the International community – who themselves had an interest in justifying their own questionable actions in the war effort - to use the now visibly identified, and increasingly vilified, individualised dirty workers. Indeed, according to Douglas, the guiding purpose of the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials was to re-establish the normative rule of an impersonal and impartial law. Only this attempt to re-civilise normative society could protect „progress‟ from a regression to an atavistic primitive. In declaring and re-affirming the absolute requirement for impartiality against the defendants, Douglas goes on to suggest that the prosecution highlighted that the trials themselves had actually become a high water-mark for progress – a polar opposite to the Nazi regime. No longer following the „hue-and-cry‟ of the localised masses, and against the ideological doctrine of the National Socialists, international law would be driven by standardised assertions of evidence, law and reason rather than „primitive‟ outcry or ideology. Similarly, Playfair and Sington (1957) point out that the Belsen Trial, the first of its kind in history, was „an astonishingly judicial one‟ (p 156) and only charged those against which there was individual evidence. Over thirty of the eighty-eight camp guards who were originally taken into custody were not brought to trial, and according to Playfair and Sington „it is pretty certain that no SS man or woman innocent of cruelty was found guilty‟ (p 158). However Sington is hardly uncritical of the Belsen Trial or of the death sentence handed to Grese. He goes onto to point out that up until April 1944, members of the armed forces who violated the rules of warfare, but were acting under orders, would be immune from punishment and could not be prosecuted. Yet this new regulation was applied retrospectively to those at Belsen. Further, he points out that the it was a British Court that sat in judgement on its defeated enemies, and who would apply their own particular understandings of the Hague and Geneva Conventions to the accused, some of whom were not members of the army and whose victims were other German Nationals. In short, it was beyond the jurisdiction of a British Court. Issues of jurisdiction aside, given the scale of the atrocities conducted by the Nazi regime and the sheer numbers of people that were required to facilitate it, it is unsurprising that the fledgling system of international law generally struggled to cope and the numbers of those prosecuted for „war crimes‟ is likely to be a tiny fraction of those who were complicit with them. At best, the fundamental base of individual culpability that under- pins nationalised versions of criminal and moral law began to look increasingly tenuous, and at worst, as Arendt (1963) would later suggest, it would represent the complete failure of modernistic institutions to cope with the scale and gravity of the Nazi atrocities. Indeed, whilst early (re)presentations of the SS Women were of a highly deviant group within a highly deviant regime, Heinke (2008, p 136-137) argues that after the initial prosecutions, there was a marked stereotyping of the SS Women in the later prosecutions within the Federal Republic itself which seemed to play down of the guilt of female concentration camp guards. This included the (gendered) assumptions that: women had no real power within the camps; women were compelled to work within the camps; that women did not have the character to act aggressively with the intention to torture and kill; and were not naturally well equipped to cope with the pressures of the concentration camp. The net implication was that over time there was a diminution of individual responsibility and the SS women were less culpable than their male counter- parts. Even after the establishment of the Central Office of Regional Administration of Justice in 1958, which in part aimed to pursue Nazi prosecutions in a more systematic and determined manner, the time-lag and difficulty of proof meant that many SS Women were ultimately not brought before a court of law. Therefore, the resulting limited number of SS Women who had been singled out by the gaze of an international court and ultimately convicted for their crimes in the early aftermath of the war became the only publically sanctioned prosecutions. As result, those prosecuted quickly became very visual symbolic representations of extreme deviance within a wider narrative of an extremely deviant regime. Nazisploitation and the sexualisation of the SS ‘She-Devils’ Female concentration camp guards would not, however, disappear entirely from public view. Whilst the public prosecutions of female concentration camp guards became more and more anonymous and less newsworthy, the cultural image of SS women would become more and more reified. In 1955 „The House of Dolls‟, a novella written by „Ka-tzetnik 135633‟, was translated from Hebrew and released in English for the first time. Presented in diary format, and purportedly based on the real experiences of the writer‟s own sister, it tells the story of a fourteen year old Polish woman who is captured and sent to „Camp Labor Via Joy‟ to work in one of the concentration camp „Joy Divisions‟ – the so-called Lagerbordell. As a forced prostitute, she would be subjected all manner of harrowing sexual and physical degradations. Indeed, the novella describes the terror as the women work knowing that their lives depend on the pleasure of their guests. The narrative is replete with Nazi cruelty, including graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, medical experiments, merciless beatings, and murder. Whilst it was later revealed that Ka-tzetnik 135633 – in reality an author named Yehiel De-Nur – did not have a younger sister, and the provenance of the narrative is highly questionable, the novella was an international best-seller. Indeed, it provided a platform for a series of exploitative cultural products that would construct and reify the deviant sexuality of the female SS Guards. In the early 1960s, the first of a series of pulp fiction „Stalag‟ magazines would emerge shortly after the „Eichmann Trial‟ in Israel. Phenomenally popular between 1963 and 1965, they would purport to depict dramatic stories of captured British and US army soldiers who were imprisoned within German Stalags. There they would encounter formidable SS Women who would subject them to domination, torture, and sadistic sex. Presented with lurid front-covers that depicted the „action‟ within, the titles of the magazines would initially take numerical form. Later editions, however, would dramatise the contents more explicitly and titles such as „Stalag of the Devils‟, „Stalag of the Wolves‟, „Women‟s Stalag‟, „Death Stalag‟, and „I was a Stalag Commander‟ would prove equally as popular. The back-covers would also hint at the contents inside. The sleeve of „Stalag 217‟ promised, „„„a true and brutally honest story of the lives of male captives bound by sadistic girls . . . women whose entire essence is based on the brimming lust for the blood of others, for deriving sadistic pleasure from their pain, and for exploiting the manhood of the captive at their mercy‟‟ (Pinchevski & Brand, 2007, p 389). The narrative clearly depicted a „beautiful but deadly‟ character who has considerable resonance with that of Irma Grese: „Stalag 217 repeatedly contrasts Lilly‟s adolescent naïveté´ to her mature cruelty as an avid Nazi: „„At first Lilly recoiled from violence...[but] a strange transformation occurred in her once she saw her friends whipping the screaming prisoners. She felt power, strength, superiority. For the first time she felt herself identifying completely with the idea of the master race” (cited in Pinchevski & Brand, 2007, p, 395). Indeed, the stories themselves clearly draw-upon, represent, and reinforce particular aspects of the deviant sexuality of the camp and the guards themselves. Selectively using images and motifs from the wider, and decadent, Nazi bricolage the magazines construct sensationalistic composite narratives which rely on sexual deviance and transgression to titillate. Conflating elements of assumed fact harvested from various (problematic) historiographies, the stories are commodified and imagined constructions of the past for the purposes of the (then) present. Indeed, Pinchevski and Brand (2007, p 388) firmly locate the short-lived success of these magazines within the reception of the Eichmann Trial by the Israeli youth, who were beginning to question both the prevailing silence of the Holocaust, and the participation of the Jewish people within it. For a generation of pubescent Israeli‟s, the “Stalags reveal a generation‟s simultaneous initiation into adulthood, nationhood, and victimhood.” It was not just young Israeli‟s who were being exposed to the increasingly sexualised imagery of the concentration camps, however. By the early 1960s, men‟s adventure magazines in the United States were also replete with similar fetishized Nazi imagery. In magazines like, „Man‟s Story‟, „New Man‟, „Man‟s Action‟, and „Argosy‟ titillating tales of captivity and torture at the hands of SS women would sit next to more general articles on sex and nudity. Figure 2: A lurid front cover of ‘Man’s Look’ Magazine By the late 1960s, the advance of more readily available pornography curtailed the popularity of „men‟s sweat magazines‟ and sales would decline. However, the images of Nazi women that they also sustained and exaggerated within their pages would soon find their expression in another form of popular culture - film. Directed by Lee Frost and written and produced by Bob Cresse, both seasoned veterans of the American sexploitation film industry, „Love Camp 7‟ would mark a new sub-genre of the „women in prison‟ film and develop the motifs introduced by the earlier Stalag pulps and sweat magazines. Infamous for sadistic scenes of rape, flagellation, drug- taking, and murder, it tells the story of a special women‟s camp where prisoners are used as sex slaves for officers of the Third Reich. Like most of the sexploitation films of the time, the story is little more than an (albeit questionable) excuse to show female flesh and „soft-core‟ sex. Preferring to concentrate on the female inmates the film does not depict SS Women directly; it did, however, pave the way for a cycle of films that would. Indeed, whilst Frost and Cresse carried on making a variety of sexploitation films it was another one of the original producers, David Friedman, who sought to cash-in on the relative success of „Love Camp 7’. Released in 1974, „Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS‟ tells the story of Ilsa, doctor and camp commandant of „Medical Camp 9‟. Theorising that women are more resistant to pain than men and would, therefore, make better soldiers, Ilsa spends much of the film attempting to prove her hypothesis by subjecting female prisoners to a barrage of medical experiments. Interspersed within graphic scenes of sexual violence, the plot also makes much of Ilsa‟s voracious sexual appetite. Primarily as an excuse to show even more nudity and soft-core sex, Isla regularly selects male prisoners to satisfy her insatiable lust – only to castrate or kill them when they fail to live up to her requirements. Mixing female nudity, sex, extreme torture, mutilation and even urolagnia with a paper- thin plot, awful dialogue, wooden acting, inept cinematography, and – given the exploitative content - at least one surreal attempt at cod-philosophical moralising, „Ilsa – She-Wolf of the SS’ was a surprise hit on the drive-in and „Grindhouse‟ cinema circuit. Despite her death at the end of the film, the success of the original would quickly mean that she was resurrected to star in films such as „Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks‟ (1976), „Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia‟ (1977), and „Ilsa, the Wicked Warden‟ (1977). Characterised by cycles of imitations and down-right „rip-offs‟ (c.f. Koven 2004), the Italian film industry similarly moved to cash-in on the box-office success of Ilsa and a number of similar films emerged in its wake. Reproducing the formula of the original Isla, other Nazispoiltation films such as „The Gestapo’s Last Orgy’ (197719), „SS Experiment Love Camp’ (1976), „SS Hell Camp’ (1976), „SS Girls’ (1976), and „SS Extermination Love Camp’ (1976), would continue to blend questionable production values with questionable content. Whilst not eclipsing the success of the original, these films were again popular with „Grindhouse‟ audiences and remain cult films today 20 . Elsewhere, 19 ‘The Gestapo’s Last Orgy’ is also somewhat bizarrely also known as ‘Caligula reincarnated as Hitler’. 20 In Britain, their infamy was cemented by their inclusion on the list of so-called ‘video nasties’. ‘The Gestapo’s Last Orgy’ SS Experiment Love Camp’ ‘SS Hell Camp’ and ‘Love Camp 7’ were effectively banned by the Video Recordings Act, 1984, and only ‘SS Experiment Love Camp’ is legally available in the UK today. more respectable „art-house‟ films such as Tinto Brass‟s „Salon Kitty‟ (1976) and Liliana Cavileri‟s „The Night Porter‟ (1974) would similarly explore sexualised themes of Nazi decadence, albeit in a less overtly exploitative manner. By the end of the decade, the Italian film industry moved on and the sub-genre appeared to have run its course. However, a number of Nazi-themed pornographic films are still being produced today and in Quentin Tarentino‟s homage to exploitation cinema „Grindhouse‟ (2007), one of the (fictional) trailers that plays as part of the film is titled „Werewolf women of the SS’. Whilst all of these films were by no means popular amongst mainstream audiences and are still largely only known for their cult status, they do demonstrate how the cultural image of the female SS guard had, by the 1970s, been reduced to sexual one. However, whilst these films are necessarily all fiction, they are frequently presented as if they are based on fact – as the title card that runs before „Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS‟ makes clear: “The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as „medical experiments‟ in special concentration camps throughout Hitler‟s Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes...We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again. [Signed] Herman Traeger, producer.” Evidently taking its cue from Ilsa Koch, the so-called „the bitch of Buchenwald‟, the narrative then proceeds to combine a variety of motifs harvested from concentration camp historiography, reducing the complexities and the tragedy of the concentration camps to their most base and salacious form. As Koven (2004, p 85) suggests: “Again and again, what we see in these Nazi sexploitation films are „composites‟ of historical reality – Jewish doctors working in the camp infirmaries, specious medical experimentation, sexual assaults on women prisoners – composites which „for dramatic purposes‟, as the Ilsa title card reads, simplify the historiographic complexities of the Third Reich”. Whilst the later moral outrage against some of the Nazi sexploitation films was unsurprising (c.f Kerekes and Slater, 2001), this process of combining and reducing historiographic detail down to this base form is little different to any number of encyclopaedia entries that describe Ilsa Koch or any other female SS guard. Compressing the dynamic lived experiences of all those who lived and worked in the concentration camps into a few lines of „historical‟ description or a ninety minute film inevitably “reduces the complexities of a real person into its most sensational elements in order to convey the extreme behaviours of those who ran the concentration camps” (Koven, 2004, p 81). Whilst the producers and directors of Nazi Sexploitation did this for their own specific purposes – indeed, in this sense some of the emergent subject material was well suited to their needs - the cultural image of the SS women had clearly been reduced into a simplified and dominant narrative that focussed upon the excessive sexuality and excessive cruelty of the Nazi regime, but significantly of the women who were given power within it. These voyeuristic images of sexual monstrosity are hardly new to narratives of evil. Indeed, Frankfurter (2006, p 84) highlights how themes of a dangerous but exciting debauchery were common to American culture throughout the 20th Century. However, whilst films like King Kong and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom depicted hapless white women in savage, and usually erotic, rituals that served to warn of the dangers that exist beyond the edge of the civilised world, the Nazisploitation genre and the narratives of Grese transmute familiar themes of otherness by depicting female and male victims in distinctly modernistic settings. Indeed, within these narratives normative ideals of science, bureaucracy, gender, and the state are inverted to construct the evil that threatens from within and at the border. However, the horror that this otherness (re)produces is only comprehensible because we recognise what ideals are being transgressed – to recognise the other, we must first be able to recognise the self. In these terms the narratives of the „She-Devils‟ venerate and reify our expectations of medicine, power, and crucially, our expectations of gender and sexuality. ‘The Beautiful Beast’: Images of an evil woman Upon Grese‟s entrance at the Belsen trial, Sington and Playfair (1957, p 159) note that:  “she was, by any standards, a pretty girl – the only one in the dock. Her hair was blonde, with ringlets resting on neat shoulders. Her eyes were clear blue under a high, broad forehead. She might have been a handsome young nurse, a secretary, or even the head prefect of a girls‟ school”. Figure 3: ‘No. 9’ Irma Grese (centre) alongside Herta Elhert (left) and Ilse Lothe (right) Similarly, the Daily Mirror would single out Grese in one report of the trial: “[A]n attractive blonde who looks like a Hollywood film-star is one of the forty-eight accused in the Belsen camp atrocity trial” (the Daily Mirror, 31-07-1945). Giselle Perl‟s initial description of her appearance is even more flattering: “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 gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine” (Perl, 1948, p 61). She does, however, immediately juxtapose her physical beauty with her depravity:  “And yet. Irma Greze [sic] was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative sexual pervert I ever came across. She was the highest ranking SS woman in Auschwitz and it was my bad luck to be under her eyes during my entire camp life” (Perl, 1948, p 61). Lengyel similarly makes much of Grese‟s aesthetic appearance in her autobiographical account, this example is typical: “...she was exceptionally beautiful. Her beauty was so effective that even though her daily visits meant roll call and selections for the gas chambers, the internees were completely entranced, gazing at her and murmuring, „How beautiful she is!‟ Were a novelist to compose such a scene, his readers would accuse him [sic] of the wildest imagination” (1948, p 155). She similarly reports that her clothes, some of them specifically tailored, were refined in style and she spent “hours grooming herself before her mirror” so that her hair was „faultlessly dressed‟. She also suggests that Grese sprayed herself with „tantalising odours‟ selected from her „rare perfumes‟, some of which she „blended herself‟, and she was not immodest with their use (p 155). Observing her naked whilst Grese was changing, it apparently came as something of a relief to Lengyel to observe that she was not aesthetically perfect: “She was far from thin, but well formed; perhaps her breasts were a little too large. Also she had thick legs. It was the first time I had seen her without the SS boots. I was happy to observe that she had an imperfection, she was so proud of her beauty” (p 197) The contrary juxtaposition of beauty and brutal depravity, which is implicitly contained within her popular moniker the „Beautiful Beast‟, is also a common theme in Lengyel‟s elaborate accounts, for example:  “Her immoderate use of perfume was perhaps the supreme refinement of her cruelty. The internees, who had fallen to a state of physical degradation, inhaled these fragrances joyfully. By contrast, when she left us and the stale, sickening odour of burnt human flesh, which covered the camp like a blanket, crept over us again the atmosphere became even more unbearable. Yet our „angel‟ with the golden tresses employed her beauty only to remind us of our terrible position” (p155). Clearly, this decadent refinery contrasts heavily with the horrors of the concentration camp. At the same time, it specifically conforms to the all-too-familiar cliché of Nazi decadence and the wider images of over-indulgence, opulence, and inherent greed and corruption. However, the Grese narrative is a particularly gendered version of this wider „decadent Nazi‟ grand narrative. Unlike the stories of Nazi gold, rampant looting/burning of cultural artefacts, over-blown neo-classical architecture, unrestrained scientific experimentation, religious reinvention, obsessive symbolism, and ultimately the holocaust itself, this particular realisation of decadence is clearly situated around a reoccurring triumvirate of the female, the body, and sexuality. The narrative trope of a sexualised feminine beauty that should be feared is one that is common to some of the most enduring myths of evil women and the stories of Pandora, the Sirens, Lillith, and even the witches of Salam and elsewhere, are replete with images of dangerous women, sex, and the temptation of female flesh. Noddings (1989) argues that the origin of the contemporary meta-image of the evil woman as „dangerous sexualised excess‟ lies in the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western culture and, whilst the religious over-tones may have dissipated, these narrative tropes clearly remain to this day. Indeed, Noddings argues that Judeo-Christian heritage has long held, albeit to varying degrees, the sanctity of the spirit over the body. The spirit is the site of salvation and the body a site for temptation and sin, very often in the form of sex. It is not surprising, therefore, that some feminist writers have suggested that within patriarchal contexts women, as objects of male sexual desire, have all-too-frequently served as scapegoats for man‟s inability to control their own lustful transgressions. In these terms, the feminine is the „devil‟s gateway‟ (c.f. Noddings 1989). Indeed, it was Eve that was persuaded by the serpent to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and Eve who subsequently tempted man: „Original sin‟ and the subsequent „fall of man‟ results from Eve‟s initial denial of innocence. Noddings goes on to propose that the institutionalisation of the normative „Eve‟ myth has its roots in the religious plurality that early forms of Judaism existed within. Seeking to establish itself in place of pagan and other religions that often emphasised, rather than suppressed, the creative powers of female sexuality, the need to inhibit these tendencies was clear: “A religion that recognised the creative powers of female sexuality was likely to attract both women and men, albeit for different reasons. Therefore this religion had to be stamped out, and all its accomplishments and manifestations had to be tabooed or forbidden under sacred law” (Nodding, 1989, p 53). This also extended to the serpent because these earlier pagan traditions had largely associated snakes with wisdom, prophetic counsel, immortality, and fertility. Regularly being depicted together in ancient relics, they were also special companions of women. Therefore, when the Virgin Mary crushes a snake under her foot in the New Testament, the act is also one that is loaded with the social and political symbolism of the time. Building on the narrative of the „fall of man‟, Noddings highlights how the image appears to call on Christian women to reject feminine values of those earlier traditions, as well as effectively linking the serpent, and all that it previously represented, to an evil that needs to be stamped out. For Noddings, the contrast between Eve and Mary is also a striking one, and one that strongly implied normative roles for both good and evil women. Indeed, in opposition to the „tempter‟ Eve, Mary is both the obedient and dutiful mother. Significantly she is also the mother to a virgin birth. An image which further reinforces the notion that virginity is symbolic of the purity of the soul: it is Mary and the virgin birth that allows the son of God, untainted by sin, to be born. By the time of the Victorian era, Noddings argues that this idealised role of the „angel of the house‟ had become so entrenched within Western culture, it was largely perceived to the natural order of things. The model of a good woman was one in which women were pregnant and pregnant again, yet pure and innocent: “Good women are supposed to be filled with joy in their lives as unselfish wives and mothers; they are to be angels – confined, of course, to the house. Both Protestantism in its renewed appreciation of marriage and motherhood and Catholicism in its reverence for Mary as the virgin mother of God contributed to this set of expectations for women” (Noddings, 1989, p 78). By the time of WWII these idealised forms of gendered evil would be very clearly reproduced and transgressed in the increasingly sexualised narrative of Grese. Indeed, within the public domain the trial appeared to firmly establish the severance of her relationship with her father and the Grese narrative commonly depicts her as wilfully rejecting her home in favour of the Nazi party. Violently corrupting the passive „angel of the house‟, Grese is clearly not limited to the domestic servitude. However, this fore-grounding of her rejection of her family home within the narrative is almost inevitably accompanied by some omissions. In addition to the fact that family disagreements are by no means pathological, Grese continued to write letters to her family after her conviction (see Brown, 1996). Similarly ignored is the presence of her sister and brother at the trial (the Daily Mirror, 28-09-1945, The Daily Mirror, 17-11- 1945) – even though it is her sister‟s testimony that draws attention to her relationship with her father. Elsewhere, her presumed defiance at the trial and her lack of contrition in the face of her over-whelming guilt is further evidence of her lack of maternal passivity. Upon hearing the verdict at the Belsen trial, the Manchester Guardian (17-11-1945) would report “Grese, hostile and scowling, was the only one to adopt an attitude that could be described as defiant. The rest just stood up automatically, listened and sat down” (p 6). Upon receiving the death sentence, Grese again stood out: “Kramer, Grese, and the other two women sentenced to death showed no emotion, though Grese coloured slightly” (the Observer, 18-11-1945, p1). Her defiance is still worthy of comment in contemporary reports. One recent article in the Daily Mirror (21-11-2005, p16), that (re)produces the standard narrative of Grese almost verbatim, suggests: “In a portrait never published before, Irma Grese, the most notorious of Hitler's women, defiantly refuses to meet the photographer's gaze” (see figure 3). Figure 3: Shortly after her arrest, Irma Grese ‘defiantly’ refuses to meet the photographer’s gaze Similarly, on the evening before the hanging, Volkenrath, Borman and Grese are variously described as singing Nazi hymns, Nazi anthems or German folk ballads. This „rousing SS songfest‟ (Brown, 1996, p 86) is again usually interpreted as being in direct 21 defiance of the authority of the Allied courts. This apparent lack of contrition and her repeated lack of care and kindness toward the inmates within the standard reproduction of the narrative – and the pictures of Belsen - contrast with the maternal image of the dutiful and compassionate carer: something that is also implicitly reinforced by references to her failure to find gainful employment as a nurse. At a time when abortion was highly contentious, the termination of her own child at the hands of Perl similarly corrupts the assumed „natural order‟ of her gender. Clearly inverting the „good mother‟ myth, the fact that the father of the aborted foetus is not mentioned only adds to the implied (sexual) deviance – especially when combined with vague stories concerning her alleged promiscuity. Indeed, and not unlike like the Sirens and Pandora before her, sexual congress with Grese – the „angel‟ with the pure face – would literally result in the ultimate punishment; death. The camp gossip that also suggested affairs with Mengle and Kramer similarly reinforce the corruptive influence of yielding to temptation and within these veritable „matches made in hell‟, penetration and congress occur on a moral plane, as well as a physical one. Alongside the obvious corruption of the „angel of the house‟ and „good mother‟ myths, parts of the Grese narrative also conform to those gendered ideals of evil that were seemingly established in the Garden of Eden and the depictions of her during the trial and after clearly emphasise her near angelic feminine beauty. Before her own testimony, Major Cranfield, defending Grese, even asked the Luneberg Court to consider whether her beauty was a guiding influence in the witness testimony. The Daily Mirror (17-10- 1945) reproduced the argument in one report: “Irma weeps, is she victim of jealous women?” then adding “Did Belsen women hate Irma Grese and fasten on her at her trial, because she is better looking than the other Belsen wardresses?” (p 18). However, this apparent beauty is almost always immediately contrasted with her apparent bestiality. 21 It is worth noting that Playfair and Sington (1957), who appear to be the first authors to refer to the singing merely describe it as: “An old camaraderie of defiance apparently possessed them. The warders say they sang continuously till dawn” (p 183). It is notable it is notable that Pierrepoint omits it from his description of events entirely. For instance, the article goes on to suggest: “when she was asked if the whip would hurt if it landed on anyone she answered pertly, „oh yes‟”. The repeated presence of the whip further reinforces the association with eve – and the serpent. In directly drawing attention to both the beautiful and the bestial, our collective expectations of female beauty are clearly violated when confronted with the image of Grese. Although Playfair and Sington are hardly alone in their opinion of Grese, their commentary, for example, implicitly suggests that there is a collective expectation for beautiful women to care for people; for them to take support roles to managers (men); and that beautiful „girls‟ are the best, and most popular, people at school. The external image of beauty is somehow representative of an inner being that is maternal, passive, supportive and caring - all of which makes a woman popular. The „beautiful beast‟, however, betrays these assumptions. Indeed, Grese‟s image transgresses deeply embedded expectations about feminine gender roles within Western society - it is as if society is surprised that such a beautiful girl could commit such atrocious acts to the extent that there is a repeated need to draw attention to the discrepancy. Whilst the images of the brutish Kramer, the embittered Bormann, and the boyish Volkenrath et al have something of the unusual in their appearance that may offer (post-hoc) hints towards their depravity, Grese does not immediately provoke „self-fulfilling‟ assumptions about her appearance and her crimes. Despite the fact that Lomrosso‟s caricatured idea that criminality is related to physical features was long discredited even in 1945, Josef Kramer does conform to our expectations of criminality – he looks evil, his brutishly masculine features tell us so: Figure 2: Josef Kramer As Weckel (2005, p 556) makes clear in her commentary on the news representations of the liberation of Belsen: “Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen-Belsen, is introduced in the British Movietone News as „a thing called Kramer – you may have seen his photograph in the papers‟, in part a reference to the prototypically coarse, hence memorable, nature of Kramer‟s facial features and to the brutal and dumb expression he had upon his arrest.” Grese, however, is „beautiful‟. But in not conforming to our collective expectations of beauty, she immediately deviates from our assumptions about who is likely to be deviant and what they look like. The image of Grese is constructed to violently transgress our normative, and patriarchal, expectations of beauty and the feminine, and she is much more visible as a result. The symbolic image of a woman „out-of-place‟, which would also be culturally realised in the „femme fatale‟ characters of the concurrent „film noir‟ genre, was one that had particular resonance in the after-math of post-war Britain and elsewhere. WWII was a war of attrition on both sides and the entrenchment of hostilities had depleted almost whole generations of the male populations of both the Allied and Axis forces. Like the German Reichsabeitsdient – weibliche Jugend and the Pflichtjahr, as a solution to the increasing need to support the war effort on the „home front‟, British and American women were increasingly required to take roles that had traditionally been the remit of men. Areas of civilian and military industry that had previously been closed to women now found themselves actively recruiting them. However, the mobilisation of a female workforce in conjunction with the repeated transportation of war-weary soldiers to and from the front also brought some not entirely unexpected consequences. Whilst images within the propaganda of the Allied forces glamorised the efforts of women on the home front, and in the process sometimes subtly encouraged their sexual availability for the morale of returning service-men (see Hegarty, 1998), elsewhere the dangers of venereal disease to that war effort were also being highlighted – and so-called promiscuous women were being labelled as a dangerous enemy within. The problem for those looking to direct the war effort, therefore, was to strike a balance between encouraging the sexual availability of women and limiting the sexually pathological (see Hegarty, 1998). Indeed, in attempting to direct and control women‟s sexuality, these campaigns effectively promoted a form of sexual independence whilst simultaneously attempting to organize it. Whilst the individual experiences of women in these newly realised roles differed (see Sheridan, 1990), when demobilisation brought the returning soldiers home from the front and women were encouraged to go back to the home, female sexuality could not simply revert back to the normative assumptions held before the war. Indeed, whilst the liberating effects of the efforts of women on the „home front‟ on future gender equality are still debated, the requirements of the war meant that taken-for-granted expectations of gender with reference to work and sexuality had become unmoored from their patriarchal foundations – women had successful demonstrated that „women‟s work‟ was not limited to domestic servitude. In these terms, the deeply sexualised image of Grese and the other SS „She-Devils‟ can be seen as the reaction of a patriarchal society struggling to reconcile and control traditional gender roles with the liberation that the war had brought both during and after the conflict. So whilst Grese‟s apparently promiscuous sexuality and her gender- defying position of employment and accompanying power was being portrayed as extremely deviant it was hardly unique for the Second World War and was, in fact, actually a symptomatic – albeit dramatic – facet of the conflict in both Allied and Axis territories. Again, what was not deviant within the context of wartime became deviant in the after-math of the war and the publically sanctioned castigation of her can be seen as an attempt to restore and re-impose the normative patriarchal order of pre-war society – to which her behaviour was extremely deviant, particularly so given her „beautiful‟ appearance. Why was Irma Grese evil? This discussion of the Irma Grese narrative is not an attempt to re-write history and it does not introduce fresh evidence into the debate. Nor is it an attempt to provide ammunition for holocaust revisionists who seek to glorify the image of Grese – indeed, there is little doubt that Grese was guilty of the crimes she was tried for. Unlike other disciplinary approaches to evil, I also have no interest in psychologically accounting for her or her actions and neither do I attempt to reduce them to a largely unaccountable nexus of biological and social forces. Instead, I ask the inter-related questions of how Grese is remembered, and why she is remembered in this way. In short, I am asking why we still remember her as evil. At first glance she appears to be like any normal German woman of the period. Her „background‟ portrays her as a relatively ordinary German girl and her early life experiences are likely to have been similar to the vast majority of German women her age. This is reinforced by the various photographs that have appeared over the years that picture her as a well presented young and „beautiful‟ woman. On the other hand however, are the grotesque images of Belsen – the product of a gross, purposeful and determined negligence - and the stories of Grese‟s own rampaging sexual desires, which are themselves symbolic of individual self-satisfaction and pleasure at the expense of anything and anyone. Indeed, the Irma Grese narrative is not just symbolic of the depravities of the Nazi regime, but one that goes beyond them. A narrative within a narrative, her story is constructed to transgress our gendered expectations of the atrocities of war and the extreme deviance of the Nazi regime and the SS in particular. As a young, notably Arrayn, „beautiful‟ woman who was seemingly repeatedly capable of extreme sexual aggression and extreme torture for her own sadistic pleasure in an environment that came to stand-in as a collective vision for „hell-on-earth‟, she symbolises extreme deviance and at the same time transgresses it. She deviates from the „known‟ parameters of the extreme deviance she was part of, the SS guards and the concentration camps, because she is a young „beautiful‟ and unrepentant woman. Against our collectively imagined maternal and home-making expectations of women, evidently „then‟ and „now‟, the image of Grese is, therefore, (re)presented to be one of a sexually aggressive young woman who apparently chose to engage in acts of extremely violent and sexual excess to the expense – and death - of others. Against the backdrop of the SS women who were becoming increasingly anonymous, but also increasingly sexualised, Irma Grese would even manage to stand out against those who were actually singled out and prosecuted for their part in the Holocaust. Perceived to be deviant to a group of extremely deviant women who were limited in number, and who were themselves part of an extremely deviant regime, she has come to represent deviance personified. Having singled her out however, her image also becomes one that invites and requires explanation. Indeed, unwilling to deny individual culpability for her actions, and, like the experts who have tried to understand the engagement of the German public with the atrocities of the Nazi regime, unable to explain them having admitted to her complicity, she becomes a symbolic spectacle of the „known unknown‟ – a contrary symbol of uncertainty in an age where rationalisation is paramount. The ordinariness of her background and the lack of a readily accessible, and satisfactory, explanation for her actions further serves to amplify her extremely deviant identity yet further as it confounds our expectations of evil people and what causes them to be evil. Grese is not mad, bad, devil or dupe – she is ordinary in every other respect. Therefore, she transgresses our expectations of explanation and is thereby more deviant as a result – all of which is more evidence of her status as an „icon of evil‟. A label that, in itself, serves as a short-hand explanatory device to quickly allows us to cleave her from the rest of normative society. However, Irma Grese‟s image as a paragon of evil is more than a lack of an individual explanation for her actions and a collective willingness to single out and remember one „dirty worker‟ out of a cast of thousands. Indeed, in highlighting how the Grese narrative constructs extreme deviance, and simultaneously transgresses it, we must further ask „deviant from what? (c.f. Jenkins, 1998). In the context of post-war Europe, Grese also seemingly contradicts our expectations about young „beautiful‟ – noticeably „- blonde‟ women in the modern age. However, in doing so, her story is one that also resonates with and reproduces some of the most enduring images of evil women within Western mythology. As a centre-point of what is now a firmly entrenched stereotype, Grese represents a refashioning of „the Devil‟s gateway‟ myth of femininity. However, Grese is not simply evil in the mould of Eve either – she is not necessarily just another tempter of men. Instead, the Grese narrative is also one that warns of the dangers of a „woman out of place‟. Indeed, by being by being seen to reject the home in favour of the state, and occupying a position of power within that state system, the fact that she is very publically convicted of abusing that power, Grese is clearly seen as a woman „out of place‟ – and the consequences of deviating from being an „angel of the house‟ are there for all to see in the lurid descriptions of her crimes, and in the collective memory of Belsen itself. References Arendt, H. (1950) „The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany.‟ Commentary (October), pp 342-53. Arendt, H. (1963) Eichman in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin Books. Anonymous (1945) „Belsen Blonde.‟ The Daily Mirror, 31-07-1945, p 13. Anonymous (1945) „Torture by No. 9‟, Newsweek, 01-10-1945, p42. Anonymous (1945) „Irma weeps, is she victim of jealous women?‟ The Daily Mirror, 17- 10-1945, p 18. Anonymous (1945) „Kramer and Grese among the Belsen guilty: How they heard their verdicts.‟ The Manchester Guardian, 17-11-1945, p 6. Anonymous (1945) „Belsen Trial: Eleven receive death sentence. The Observer, 18-11- 1945, p 1. Anonymous (2010) „Evil women‟, in ‘The People’, 19-09-10. Brown, D.P. (1996) The Beautiful Beast: The Life and Crimes of SS Aufseherin Irma Grese. Ventura CA: Golden West Historical Publications. Coser, L. (1969) „The visibility of evil‟, Journal of Social Issues, 25, 1, pp 101-110. Darley, J.M. (1992) „Social organisation for the production of evil‟. Psychological Inquiry, 3, 2, pp 199-218. Erikson, K.T. (1962) Notes on the sociology of deviance. Social Problems, 9, pp 307-314. Ezard, J. (2005) „Beast of Belsen and his lover in Nuremberg exhibit.’ The Guardian, 21- 11-2005. Frankfurter, D. (2006) Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Glyn-Jones, R. (1996) The Giant Book of Killer Women. Sydney: The Book Company. Harrower, M. (1976) „Were Hitler‟s henchmen mad?‟. Psychology Today, July, 1976. Hegarty, M.E. (1998) Patriot or prostitute?: Sexual discourse, print media, and American Women during World War II. Journal of Women’s History, 10, 2, pp 112-136. Heinke, I. (2008) „Female Concentration Camp Guards as Perpetrators: Three Case Studies‟, in, O. Jensen and C.C.W. Szejnman (eds.) Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Contemporary Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heineman, E. D. (2003) What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerekes, D. & Slater, D. (2001) See no evil: Banned films and video controversy. London: Headpress. Koontz, C. (1986) Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St Martin‟s Press. Koven M.J. (2004) „The film you are about to see is based on documented fact: Italian Nazi sexploitation cinema‟, in, Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds.), London: Wallflower. Leitner, I. (1978) Fragments of Isabella: A memoir of Auschwitz. Crowell: New York. Lengyel, O. (1995) Five Chimneys: A Woman's True Story of Auschwitz. New York: Academy Chicago, Limited. Lifton, R. J. (1986) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books: London. Milgram, S. (1963) „Behavioural study of obedience‟. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 67, pp 371/378. Noddings, N. (1989) Women and Evil. Berkely: University of California Press. Perl, G. (1948) I was a doctor in Auschwitz. International Universities Press: New York. Phillips, R. (Ed.) (1949) The Trial of Joseph Kramer and Forty-Four Others: The Belsen Trial. London: William Hodge. Playfair, G. & Sington D. (1957) The offenders: the case against legal vengeance. New York: Simon and Schuster Pierrepoint, A. (1974) Executioner: Pierrepoint. Sevenoaks, Kent: Coronet.. Przyrembel, A. (2001) Transfixed by an image: Ilse Koch, the „Kommandeuse of Buchenwald‟. German History, 19, 3, pp 369-399. Raymond, C. (2005) „Nazi She-Devils‟. The Daily Mirror, 21-11-2005. Schwarz, G. (2002) „During total war, we girls want to be where we can really accomplish something‟, in O. Bartov, A. Grossman, and M. Nolan (eds.) Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century. New Press: New York, pp 121-137. Sheridan, D. (ed) (1990) Wartime Women: a Mass Observation Anthology. London: Heinemann. Sofsky, I. (1997) The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Princeton: Princeton University Press. United Nations War Crimes Commission (1947) Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals. Volume II: The Belsen Trial. London: HMSO. Waller, J. (2007) Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weckel, U. (2005) Does gender matter? Filmic representations of the liberated Nazi concentration camps. Gender and History, 17, 3, pp 538-566. Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C. & Banks, W. C. (1973) „Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison‟. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.