This is the story of Irma Grese who, over the course of three-quarters of a century since the end of World War II, has become 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 Ravens-brück prison camp for women. Eight months later, she was transferred to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau where, at twenty-one, she was promoted to the highest rank achievable in the camps by a woman, and then, at only twenty-two, sentenced to hang by the British War Trials military tribunal, despite uncorroborated and conflicting testimo-nies about her, her own consistent denials, and a puzzling silence from half of the witnesses gathered to provide evidence against her. This young woman who had wanted to become a nurse and had fantasized about being a famous film actress after the war, instead became Auschwitz' infamous 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 the gas chambers.

But was she the monster she was made out to be? And was she guilty of mass murder? Or was she only following the dictates of her superiors, as she claimed? It would be easy for a prosecutor who has never known the brutal pressures to conform in a totalitarian system, to say, "I would never have followed such orders. Why didn't you just say no to Hitler?" But being there, as Irma Grese and the German people were, living and working daily in the Nazi system which indoctrinated and controlled them, saying no to Hitler was not something that could have been done without dire personal consequences. After all, it was the constant threat of physical violence, to everyone, which gave the Third Reich its power, and enabled it to endure for over a decade.