60 years on.. Auschwitz remembered: I escaped the Angel of Hell; PoW RECALLS HITLER'S VILEST HENCHWOMAN.

Byline: TOM PARRY and JANE KERR

IT IS now 60 years since Norman Cooper walked away from Auschwitz, where he spent two desperate years as a British prisoner of war.

Today at 85, and on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, he needs no reminding of the day he came across Irma Grese, the most notorious of the Nazi female camp guards.

"She was a monster," says Norman, still shuddering at the memory of Auschwitz's "Blonde Angel of Hell".

A senior SS-Supervisor at Auschwitz, with 30,000 female prisoners under her command, Grese was responsible for some of the worst atrocities at the Nazi death camp.

Indulging her own sadistic perversions, the "Beautiful Beast" would grin with pleasure as she handed out vicious beatings, set her half-starved Alsatian dogs on prisoners and selected inmates for the gas chambers.

Other prisoners were shot in cold blood and Grese became fascinated by the despicably vile "medical" experiments carried out on Jewish inmates.

At the end of the war, the camp's liberators found in her hut the lamp shades she had had made from the skins of prisoners.

One of the few surviving British prisoners of the camp in the south of Poland, Norman has now provided extraordinary details about Grese.

"She always wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol," recalls Norman, now a grandfather in Doncaster, S Yorkshire.

"We were often taken past the Jewish girls' camp. It was terrible. You would see her crack her whip against the ground. She was a very cruel woman.

"I remember seeing her walk the Jewish men around and then make them leave the door open while they went to the toilet, to humiliate them."

The daughter of an agricultural labourer, Grese joined the Hitler Youth when she was 11.

By the time she was 19, she was a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Obsessively devoted to Hitler, she was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen before rising to the second highest rank held by SS female camp guards at Auschwitz.

When she was eventually captured and put on trial for war crimes, Grese showed no remorse. Extensive records of her murders, torture, cruelty and sexual excesses during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen horrified judges at the war crimes trials in 1945.

Grese was sentenced to be hanged and on December 13, 1945, she walked to the gallows, calm and composed, with her arm raised in a Nazi salute.

Norman Cooper arrived at Auschwitz in June 1943. On his first day, the young Royal Engineer was forced to strip, his head shaved and he was sent into a pit to be de-loused.

He had already spent two years in other concentration camps, but he soon discovered that Auschwitz was a different kind of hell.

"Only five yards from us were the bodies of three Jewish boys, no more than 26 years old," recalls Norman.

Half-naked and pitifully thin, the bodies of the young men had been dumped like rubbish.

"I turned to my mate and said: 'Oh dear, Sam, what have we come to?' I remember he said: 'They're political prisoners, we've no need to worry.'"

But this shocking introduction to Auschwitz was only the start of the horrors he was to carry with him for the rest of his life.

More than a million prisoners would die at Auschwitz before its liberation in January 1945 - but for Norman it was the Nazi inhumanity to children that shocked him to the core.

"I will never forget this lad. This Frenchman asked me if I would look after his son. The man's legs were covered in ulcers and he was in a bad way. His boy must have been about 10 years old.

"I gave the lad a bit of bread and I said I'd do my best for him and he would always come up to me. One day I asked the lad what had happened to his father and he said: 'He's gone up the chimney.'

"I kept my promise to look out for him, but the SS caught him with some food and cigarettes from a Red Cross parcel. I never saw him again."

Norman adds: "Even though there were lots of young lads there, eight or ten-years-old, you never saw them play or laugh.

"You never heard singing. They worked until they died. That was their only freedom."

Today he recalls the utter hopelessness of the Jewish prisoners he worked beside in the slave gangs at IG Farben, the German chemical giant.

"They used to throw themselves off the towers at the factory into drums of stagnant water. We used to pull them out, but the SS guards would say: 'You're wasting your time.' So they'd just be left to die.

"Before they'd been on the ground an hour, someone would have taken their boots and clothes and they'd lie there, bare to the bone.

"There was no resistance left in them anyway. There was nothing left in their souls."

CAPTION(S):

TORTURE: SS guard Irma Grese; HORROR: Norman today and then