Ilse Grese

Ilse Grese is a young female supervisor in Kat Zet I, at once a figure of intimate familiarity to Angelus Thomsen and a commanding presence in the camp’s machinery of coercion. The narrative sets her sneering ease in a private cubicle against her uniformed authority over prisoners, most starkly in the threatened punishment of Esther Kubis. Her story ends with her execution at twenty-two, after a night of singing and one last, telling use of the word “schnell.”

Identity and Presence

At the time Angelus Thomsen visits her in Kat Zet I, Ilse is not yet twenty; the narration notes that she will turn twenty the following month. She is in her cubicle at dusk, hunched halfway down her cot with her ankles crossed, reading an illustrated magazine and not looking up as he enters. Her uniform hangs from a nail in a metal beam, while she wears a dark-blue housecoat and baggy grey socks. A gunbelt and an oxhide whip lie on the floor. The objects are not in use in this moment, but their presence makes the private room inseparable from her official power.

Ilse greets Thomsen with the insult, “Aha. I smell Icelander. I smell arsehole.” Her habitual manner toward him is described as sneering and languid; his, by contrast, is floridly donnish, a style he says he developed to counteract an appearance some people found forbidding. Their exchange establishes a relationship conducted through provocation and performance, not ordinary tenderness. The contrast between her relaxed posture and the weaponry at her feet also gives the scene its unsettling balance: apparent ease and capacity for violence occupy the same small space.

Authority in the Camp

Ilse’s role extends well beyond her personal encounters. During the preparations for the arrival of Special Train 105, Paul Doll includes Senior Supervisor Grese and her platoon among the forces assembled on the ramp. He specifically commends her firmness with recalcitrant female prisoners. The inventory around her is relentlessly numerical: physicians, disinfectors, guards, a machine-gun unit, flamethrowers, and a large troop formation. Within that apparatus, Ilse’s authority is directed particularly at women, and the euphemistic language of supervisory competence sits beside the overwhelming force marshalled to control the arriving prisoners.

The Officers’ Mess offers another view of her position. Ilse appears among the Helferinnen and Special Supervisors, accompanied by Hedwig, her new fifteen-year-old protégée. That detail places their connection inside a social world where young women hold supervisory status and where mentorship can reproduce the camp’s hierarchy. Later, Boris Eltz tells Thomsen that Ilse has “gone queer on us” and recalls her repeated use of “Schnell.” The word links her manner in private to the discipline of the camp: speed is both a characteristic verbal refrain and a command associated with the system she serves.

Esther Kubis and the Threat of Punishment

Ilse’s authority becomes most consequential in the episodes surrounding Esther Kubis. Boris tells Thomsen that Esther is being persecuted by Ilse and Hedwig. He connects the conflict to an earlier quarrel with Ilse, after seeing her use a lash; he describes the quarrel as sordid and says that his response to what he witnessed contributed to a sexual fiasco between them. The account therefore entwines violence against prisoners with the officers’ private relations, without making those relations an alternative to Ilse’s power over Esther.

When Thomsen sees Esther rehearsing with other female prisoners, Ilse is overseeing the work in full Aufseherin uniform: cape, white shirt and black tie, long skirt, boots, and a crested belt with the whip coiled in it. Esther is organizing what appears to be a slow waltz. Her movement is reluctant, yet fluid; during a lull, she rises barefoot onto her toes and forms a circle with her arms. Boris says Ilse cares deeply about the performance and has come to think of herself as connected to high culture. The scene’s grace is therefore watched and judged under the same authority that carries the whip.

The stakes are made explicit when Esther tells Boris she intends to punish him. He warns Thomsen that if she is thought to have failed, Ilse will flog her to death half an hour later. The threat turns a performance into a test whose consequences are not confined to artistic success: Esther’s body is at risk under the supervisor who oversees the rehearsal. Ilse’s investment in the event does not soften her power over Esther; rather, it sharpens the danger by making the prisoner’s performance answerable to Ilse’s judgment.

At a later point, Ilse is again heard from a doorway, shouting “Aufseherin!” Two girls who had been wrestling and laughing immediately straighten up, and Hedwig marches her prisoner outside. The brief interruption shows how quickly play gives way to the discipline Ilse represents. Her call works as an order, and Hedwig’s response carries that authority beyond Ilse herself.

Intimacy, Image, and Contradiction

Thomsen later acknowledges that he had sexual relations with Ilse, calling her a murderess in the same recollection. The juxtaposition refuses to separate private desire from public responsibility: his intimacy with her is part of his own compromised history, not evidence that her violence belongs to some unrelated version of her character. The earlier cubicle scene makes the same tension visible through material details. Ilse is reading in house clothes, but her uniform, gunbelt, and whip remain close at hand.

Boris names the reputation attached to her at the performance venue: “The Beautiful Beast.” He argues that the title is only partly wrong, while Thomsen finds himself looking at Ilse afresh. He describes her strong, widely planted legs and heavy body in a black serge uniform marked with its insignia, then recalls that he had kissed her and sought favour from her. The nickname condenses the narrative’s contrast between an image of beauty and the brutality of her position; the narration does not allow either side to erase the other.

Execution and Narrative Significance

Ilse was hanged at Hamelin Prison in the British Zone on December 13, 1945. She was twenty-two. The account says that she sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” and “Ich Hatt’ einen Kameraden” loudly throughout the night. According to her executioner, Pierrepoint, her last word was “schnell.” The word had earlier been remembered by Boris as one of her habitual refrains, so its recurrence at the end connects the young woman in the camp to the condemned prisoner awaiting execution. A command associated with haste becomes, in her final moment, the word that others report she spoke before her death.

Ilse’s characterization is built through repeated collisions: the teenager reading on a cot and the supervisor with a whip; the officer associated with a dance performance and the woman whose threatened punishment could be fatal; the intimate remembered by Thomsen and the perpetrator he names. The ending supplies no redemption or transformation. Instead, her execution closes the biography while making the earlier details newly legible: her authority was exercised over the vulnerable, her private relations did not cancel it, and her final “schnell” carries the sound of the command that had marked her throughout.