Irma Grese Schnell

This is the story of Irma Grese who, over the course of three-quarters of a century since the end of World War II, remains one of the most controversial and compelling figures to have risen from the ashes of the Third Reich. She was the youngest and most quickly promoted SS-Helferin guard in Nazi Germany, just nineteen when she began at the Ravensbr?ck prison camp which Himmler built for women fifty miles north of Berlin. Eight months later, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the new extermination camp in Poland where, in but two years, at only twenty-one, she achieved the highest rank possible in the camps for a woman. Then, at only twenty-two, she was sentenced to hang by the British War Trials military tribunal...despite uncorroborated and conflicting testimonies about her, her own consistent denials of the charges facing her, and a puzzling silence from more than half of the witnesses gathered to provide evidence against her. This young wo-man who had tried to become a nurse, and had fantasized about becoming a film actress after the war, instead became Auschwitz' infamous last Oberaufseherin, praised for her beauty as well as said to have been a "notorious, ferocious savage and the worst of SS women" who helped Josef Mengele send thousands of prisoners to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Her story begins here, near the end of the war, at the end of her meteoric rise in Himmler's concentration camp system. Along with Mengele, and another camp doctor and their driver, with the Russian Red Army at their backs, she leaves Auschwitz during the mass camp evacuation in a blizzard heading back to Germany...back to where it all began for her at Ravensbr?ck. During the storm-shrouded journey, as if moving backwards in time, memories of her family, dreams, and the triggers of conversations with the others in the car, slowly reveal the events of her short life: her unhappy school days; the family tragedy when she was thirteen; her difficult and scarring relationship with her father; the powerful and important men in the Nazi hierarchy she encountered. Upon reaching Ravensbr?ck, the narrative then turns and begins to draw us forward along with her as she moves through the final year of her life, toward the trial for War Crimes awaiting her.