Mean girls, then and now

by David Benjamin

“The dogs were tearing at the girls’ bodies. Irma [Grese] came closer to observe what they were doing. Her eyes were bloodshot. The sight of the blood seemed to intoxicate her. She panted. She was sexually excited—everybody could see that. We stood in a trance, as at a gladiatorial combat.”
—Gisella Perl, Auschwitz survivor

MADISON, Wis.—This nation has reached a turning point in its on-and-off flirtation with feminism. While America’s mas macho president surrounds himself with male submissives who are little more than cringing lickspittles, court jesters and girly-boys, he has assembled a veritable harem of the most kickass broads since Xenia Onatopp almost squeezed James Bond to death between her thighs. MAGA has become our wellspring of mean girls.

First to mind, of course, is Kristi Noem, our Secretary for the Glory of the Fatherland, famous for taking her disobedient dog, Cricket, to a gravel pit and blowing the pooch’s brains out. More recently, Noem’s El Salvador escapade, when she posed, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, in front of caged men at the CECOT prison, was her most inspiring photo op—partly because it evokes a fraulein named Irma Grese.

Grese also loved to contrast herself with prisoners—in Nazi concentration camps. Rather than a Rolex, her prop was Chanel No. 5. Auschwitz survivor Olga Lenyel, recalled, “When she walked through the camp with a whip in her hand, she was surrounded by a cloud of choice perfume.”

Part of the the current U.S. regime’s challenge is weaning women away from their perception as the “fair sex.” Indeed, history suggests that women, given power by the state, can match any extreme of manly bloodlust. Queen Mary I, known as “Bloody Mary,” burned at least three hundred Protestants at the stake. Isabella, who sponsored Columbus’ voyages, was godmother to the Spanish Inquisition, agog over the flaying, racking, beheading and burning of thousands of Jews and Protestants. In 1572, Catherine de Medici, queen of France, orchestrated a nationwide massacre of Huguenots in honor of St. Bartholomew.

Perhaps the most theatrical of history’s mean girls was Elizabeth Bathory, a noblewoman who fought boredom in her Transylvanian castle, according to historians, by “jamming pins and needles under the fingernails of her servants, tying them down, smearing them with honey, and leaving them to be attacked by bees and ants … Bathory believed that human blood would keep her looking young and healthy.” One of her pastimes was to lock a peasant girl inside a torture machine, like the one in The Princess Bride. While steel blades slashed the girl to ribbons, the Countess Elizabeth stood beneath, bathed in a warm shower of blood.

Here’s the rub. These tales of ghoulish European noblewomen—and even redblooded American murderesses like Lizzie Borden, Bonnie Parker and Caril Ann Fugate (whose killing spree with Charlie Starkweather inspired six movies)—don’t offer much useful fuel for the self-dehumanization of Trump’s harem of apprentice sadists.

Regarding them generationally, I’ve divided the White House’s vamps into two softball teams. On one bench are the fiftyish Cougars, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Congress-gals Marjorie Taylor Greene and Loren Boebert, Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, etc. The other dugout, the Barbies, all twenty-something, boasts the White House P.R. tag team of Karoline Leavitt and Abigail Jackson, ruthless DHS pressgirl Tricia McLaughlin, DNI flack Olivia Coleman and Pentagon spokescutie Kingsley Wilson, etc.

It’s this dewy roster of ambitious hotties who pose the potential of altering forever the definition of womanhood, especially if they emulate role models fresher than Bloody Mary—like Ilsa Koch, who started out as a happily married mother of three, a classic hausfrau. But she wanted more. Luckily, her husband, Karl-Otto Koch was the SS officer in charge of the Buchenwald concentration camp. By the end of World War II, still short of her 40th birthday, Ilsa had become the “Bitch of Buchenwald” a legendary figure in the annals of torture and sadism. Ilsa’s reign of terror made her eligible for execution as a war criminal. But she copped a relatively mild sentence because she had the foresight to kill almost all the witnesses to her sanguinary frolics at Buchenwald.

The most important aspect of Ilsa’s elevation to infamy was that was, to all appearances, she was just a normal girl with no evident pathologies. The same profile applies, for example, to Tricia McLaughlin, a pretty blonde Ohio girl who never whipped or garroted any of her classmates at Sycamore High. Today, she’s praising the rendition of men, women and children to overseas black sites and American gulags like Donald Trump’s “Alligator Auschwitz” in the Everglades.

Sadly, as hard as she’s trying to man up, Tricia languishes in the shadow of forebears like Ilsa Koch. Tricia is Cricket-killing Kristi’s brightest protégé, but even Secretary Noem, who loves wearing body armor and brandishing a nightstick, is still an amateur sadist. Like most American girls, Tricia, Kristi, Karoline, Kingsley and all the other White House odalisques grew up in a girl world of nurture, empathy and Donna Reed motherhood. To become the Bitch of Buchenwald, sweet Ilsa had to be immersed in a culture of raving hatred and human degradation in which the cruelest of the cruel were most revered. She had to learn—and take to heart—the steely conviction that the prisoners under her heel were not merely objects. They were insects.

In sum, Trump’s harpies need to study, emulate and absorb. They need to buckle down and look up to role models like …
… Dr. Herta Oberheuser, member of a “medical” team at the Ravensbruck camp, who used human “guinea pigs” to pursue the fantasy of regenerating dead tissue. Yeah, Frankenstein. Herta took part in “experiments,” without anesthetic, such as infecting wounds with rusty nails, shards of glass, dirt or sawdust. They amputated limbs and cut away muscle and nerve tissue without any actual medical purpose. They were vivisecting Jews just for kicks.

Hermine Braunsteiner aspired to be a nurse but flunked the entrance exam. This disappointment led to her fame as the “Stomping Mare” of the Majdanek death camp. Her nickname derived from her pastime of trampling women to death by jumping up and down on them in jackboots. She also enjoyed “selecting” women and children for extermination. At Hermine’s war crimes trial, one witness remembered a prisoner who tried to save his child’s life by hiding her in his backpack. But Hermine spotted the kid, beat her with a whip and personally escorted her to the gas chamber.

The undisputed heroine of feminine sadism—who will serve as a spiritual guide for all the concentration camp guards who will have to be recruited, trained and hardened by ICE reichsführer Stephen Miller—is Irma Ilse Ida Grese, the 
“Beast of Belsen” and “Hyena of Auschwitz.” A fetching farm girl from Austria who had worked as a nurse’s aide, Irma began her dehumanization at Ravensbruck as a teenager. She was a quick study. She became a sort of sadism celebrity, serving stints at several camps, reaching the pinnacle of her career at the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau slaughterhouse. One of her witnesses, Gisella Perl, wrote that Irma’s favorite toy was a cellophane whip that she used to lacerate women’s breasts and rip their nipples. When these wounds became septic, she attended surgeries during which the doctor, using an unsterilized knife, without anesthesia, sliced away chunks of infected tissue.

Perl, one of the inmate physicians forced to do these operations, wrote, “I happened to look up and encountered the most horrible sight … Irma Grese was enjoying the sight of this human suffering. Her tense body swung back and forth in a revealing, rhythmical motion. Her cheeks were flushed and her wide-open eyes had the rigid, staring look of complete sexual paroxysm.”

Today’s secretive cruelties against the inmates of America’s concentration camps—which are fiercely defended by Trump’s MAGA harem—are probably child’s play compared to the barbarism of monsters like Ilsa and Irma. But the distance between justifying inhumanity and celebrating it is short, downhill and slippery. The stage is set for the land of the free to groom a sisterhood of mean girls for whom heartless brutality— especially against other women, especially if those women are not white—is not merely tolerated. It’s patriotic.

I turn on the TV to Karoline Leavitt, 27, blonde and perky but with blank eyes, at a White House podium, spinning official lies about innocent people snatched off the street without cause and imprisoned without a trial, and I hear the words of Holocaust witness Olga Lenyel: “It defied belief that such a pretty girl could be so cruel.”