THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

This scholarly biography of the most notorious female SS concentration camp guard pursues a fuller portrait than the caricature shaped during her 1945 war crimes trial.

Brown (The Camp Women: 2002, etc.) scours documentary evidence and interviews with surviving witnesses for clues to explain why Irma Grese, only 22 when she was hanged three months after her trial, became part of the SS killing machinery. She grew up 50 miles north of Berlin in a rural community where her father was a dairyman. When Grese was 12, her mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. At 14, Grese left school, worked menial jobs, apprenticed as a nursing aide and joined Nazi youth groups. After an incident with a pistol, her father banished her. Brown surveys the environment in which Nazism and Grese came of age together and concludes: “After serious conflict with her father and following the futility of attempting to find her niche in business, medicine, and farming, she sensed a genuine feeling of accomplishment as an SS Aufseherin.” Nazi ideology filled a void. Less clear is why she so thoroughly embraced the sadistic brutality that marked her tenures at Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Brown’s scholarship is solid and exhaustive. A six-page glossary, historical photos, appendix of supporting documents, extensive source list, and index supplement the text. Footnotes often fill one-fourth of the page, creating an almost parallel narrative. The writing is clear and fluid, but the text, riddled with German terms, and the research the author crams into footnotes will challenge casual readers. The notes should be read and perhaps should have been incorporated into the narrative. First published in 1996, Brown updated this second edition in 2004, six years before retiring as a dean at Moorpark College. Given the growth of women’s studies programs, it’s easy to imagine new sources informing another update, but this work holds up well and remains relevant.

An enduring, informed contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.