Teacher’s Book Profiles Female Nazi ‘Beast’

Moorpark College history teacher Daniel Patrick Brown first saw Irma Grese on a TV show when he was 8 years old.

The Nazi guard’s image lingered with him until he was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, where a teacher assigned him to write a biography on an interesting person.

He hit the books, looking up “Nazi” and “World War II” in the encyclopedia. Finally, he stumbled upon Grese’s name. She was found guilty at a war-crimes trial, and was hanged in Germany on Dec. 13, 1945.

Brown’s research led to a book, “The Beautiful Beast: The Life & Crimes of SS-Aufseherin Irma Grese.” It was published by Golden West Historical Publications, a small Ventura publishing company, last summer. About 3,500 copies of the biography have sold so far, Brown said.

Brown has been touring, including radio interviews and book-signing stops in Boca Raton, Fla., Kansas City, Mo., and Everett, Wash. He has also spoken at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks.

The 130-page, softcover book is pieced together through interviews with Holocaust survivors, old articles from Time and Life magazines, touched-up photographs of Grese and her accomplices, and transcripts from war-crimes trials that Brown dug up at UCLA.

Brown psychoanalyzes Grese, whom camp inmates first dubbed the Beautiful Beast. He describes her stern father, her mother’s death and her fear of neighborhood children.

Belonging to the elite Nazi SS unit, or the Schutzstaffel, transformed Grese--who was a “no one from nowhere”--into a woman of brutal power, Brown said.

Brown received grants that enabled him to travel to Germany and Israel, where he also did hands-on research and conducted extensive interviews with scholars and Holocaust survivors.

Although he is not Jewish, Brown said he is interested in periods in history that reveal the “dark side of humankind.” Brown, a Vietnam veteran who has taught at Moorpark for more than a decade, said he is also interested in the Civil War and European settlers’ treatment of Native Americans.