If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
Read If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women Online
Authors: Sarah Helm
A Life in Secrets
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-0-7481-1243-2
Copyright © 2015 Sarah Helm
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
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London, EC4Y 0DY
To those who refused
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Primo Levi, ‘If This is a Man’
Contents
1. Langefeld
2. Sandgrube
3. Blockovas
4. Himmler Visits
5. Stalin’s Gift
6. Else Krug
7. Doctor Sonntag
8. Doctor Mennecke
9. Bernburg
10. Lublin
11. Auschwitz
12. Sewing
13. Rabbits
14. Special Experiments
15. Healing
16. Red Army
17. Yevgenia Klemm
18. Doctor Treite
19. Breaking the Circle
20. Black Transport
21. Vingt-sept Mille
22. Falling
23. Hanging On
24. Reaching Out
25. Paris and Warsaw
26. Kinderzimmer
27. Protest
28. Overtures
29. Doctor Loulou
30. Hungarians
31. A Children’s Party
32. Death March
33. Youth Camp
34. Hiding
35. Königsberg
36. Bernadotte
37. Emilie
38. Nelly
39. Masur
40. White Buses
41. Liberation
F
rom Berlin’s Tegel airport it takes just over an hour to reach Ravensbrück. The first time I drove there, in February 2006, heavy snow was falling and a lorry had jack-knifed on the Berlin ring road, so it would take longer.
Heinrich Himmler often drove out to Ravensbrück, even in atrocious weather like this. The head of the SS had friends in the area and would drop in to inspect the camp as he passed by. He rarely left without issuing new orders. Once he ordered more root vegetables to be put in the prisoners’ soup. On another occasion he said the killing wasn’t going fast enough.
Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. The camp took its name from the small village that adjoins the town of Fürstenberg and lies about fifty miles due north of Berlin, off the road to Rostock on Germany’s Baltic coast. Women arriving in the night sometimes thought they were near the coast because they tasted salt on the wind; they also felt sand underfoot. When daylight came they saw that the camp was built on the edge of a lake and surrounded by forest. Himmler liked his camps to be in areas of natural beauty, and preferably hidden from view. Today the camp is still hidden from view; the horrific crimes enacted there and the courage of the victims are largely unknown.
Ravensbrück opened in May 1939, just under four months before the outbreak of war, and was liberated by the Russians six years later – it was one of the very last camps to be reached by the Allies. In the first year there were fewer than 2000 prisoners, almost all of whom were Germans. Many had been arrested because they opposed Hitler – communists, for example, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who called Hitler the Antichrist. Others were rounded up simply because the Nazis considered them inferior beings and wanted them removed from society: prostitutes, criminals, down-and-outs and Gypsies. Later, the camp took in thousands of women captured in countries occupied by the
Nazis, many of whom had been in the resistance. Children were brought there too. A small proportion of the prisoners – about 10 per cent – were Jewish, but the camp was not formally designated a camp for Jews.
At its height, Ravensbrück had a population of about 45,000 women; over the six years of its existence around 130,000 women passed through its gates, to be beaten, starved, worked to death, poisoned, executed and gassed. Estimates of the final death toll have ranged from about 30,000 to 90,000; the real figure probably lies somewhere in between, but so few SS documents on the camp survive nobody will ever know for sure. The wholesale destruction of evidence at Ravensbrück is another reason the camp’s story has remained obscured. In the final days, every prisoner’s file was burned in the crematorium or on bonfires, along with the bodies. The ashes were thrown in the lake.
I first learned of Ravensbrück when writing an earlier book about Vera Atkins, a wartime officer with the British secret service’s Special Operations Executive. Immediately after the war Vera launched a single-handed search for British SOE women who had been parachuted into occupied France to help the resistance, many of whom had gone missing. Vera followed their trails and discovered that several had been captured and taken to concentration camps.
I tried to reconstruct her search, and began with her personal papers, which were filed in brown cardboard boxes and kept by her sister-in-law Phoebe Atkins at her home in Cornwall. The word ‘Ravensbrück’ was written on one of the boxes. Inside were handwritten notes from interviews with survivors and with SS suspects – some of the earliest evidence gathered about the camp. I flicked through the papers. ‘We had to strip naked and were shaved,’ one woman told Vera. There was ‘a column of choking blue smoke’.
A survivor talked of a camp hospital where ‘syphilis germs were injected into the spinal cord’. Another described seeing women arrive at the camp after a ‘death march’ through the snow from Auschwitz. One of the male SOE agents, imprisoned at Dachau, wrote a note saying he had heard about women from Ravensbrück being forced to work in a Dachau brothel.
Several of the interviewees mentioned a young woman guard called Binz who had ‘light, bobbed hair’. Another guard had once been a nanny in Wimbledon. Among the prisoners were ‘the cream of Europe’s women’, according to a British investigator; they included General de Gaulle’s niece, a former British women’s golf champion and scores of Polish countesses.
I began to look for dates of birth and addresses in case any of the survivors – or even the guards – might still be alive. Someone had given Vera the address of a Mrs Chatenay, ‘who knows about the sterilisation of children in Block 11’. A Doctor Louise Le Porz had made a very detailed statement
saying the camp was built on an estate belonging to Himmler and his private
Schloss
, or château, was near by. Her address was Mérignac, Gironde, but from her date of birth she was probably dead. A Guernsey woman called Julia Barry lived in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. Other addresses were impossibly vague. A Russian survivor was thought to be working ‘at the mother and baby unit, Leningrad railway station’.
Towards the back of the box I found handwritten lists of prisoners, smuggled out by a Polish woman who had taken notes in the camp as well as sketches and maps. ‘The Poles had all the best information,’ the note said. The woman who wrote the list turned out to be long dead, but some of the addresses were in London, and the survivors still living.
I took the sketches with me on the first drive out to Ravensbrück, hoping they would help me find my way around when I got there. But as the snow thickened I wondered if I’d reach the camp at all.
Many tried and failed to reach Ravensbrück. Red Cross officials trying to get to the camp in the chaos of the final days of war had to turn back, such was the flow of refugees moving the other way. A few months after the war, when Vera Atkins drove out this way to start her investigation, she was stopped at a Russian checkpoint; the camp was inside the Russian zone of occupation and access by other Allied nationals was restricted. By this time, Vera’s hunt for the missing women had become part of a bigger British investigation into the camp, resulting in the first Ravensbrück war crimes trials, which opened in Hamburg in 1946.
In the 1950s, as the Cold War began, Ravensbrück fell behind the Iron Curtain, which split survivors – east from west – and broke the history of the camp in two.
Out of view of the West, the site became a shrine to the camp’s communist heroines, and all over East Germany streets and schools were named after them.
Meanwhile, in the West, Ravensbrück literally disappeared from view. Western survivors, historians, journalists couldn’t even get near the site. In their own countries the former prisoners struggled to get their stories published. Evidence was hard to access. Transcripts of the Hamburg trials were classified ‘secret’ and closed for thirty years.
‘Where was it?’ was one of the most common questions put to me when I began writing about Ravensbrück, along with: ‘Why was there a separate women’s camp? Were the women Jews? Was it a death camp? Was it a slave labour camp? Is anyone still alive?’
In those countries that lost large numbers in the camp, survivors’ groups tried to keep memories alive. An estimated 8000 French, 1000 Dutch, 18,000
Russians and 40,000 Poles were imprisoned. Yet, for different reasons in each country, the story has been obscured.
In Britain, which had no more than twenty women in the camp, the ignorance is startling, as it is in the US. The British may know of Dachau, the first concentration camp, and perhaps of Belsen because British troops liberated it and the horror they found there, captured on film, for ever scarred the British consciousness. Otherwise only Auschwitz, synonymous with the gassing of the Jews, has real resonance.
After reading Vera’s files I looked around to see what had been written on the women’s camp. Mainstream historians – nearly all of them men – had almost nothing to say. Even books written on the camps since the end of the Cold War seemed to describe an entirely masculine world. Then a friend, working in Berlin, leant me a hefty collection of essays mostly by German women academics. In the 1990s, feminist historians had begun a fightback. This book promised to ‘release women from the anonymity that lies behind the word prisoner’. A plethora of further studies had followed as other authors – usually German – carved off sections of Ravensbrück and examined them ‘scientifically’, which seemed to stifle the story. I noticed mention of a ‘Memory Book’, which sounded far more interesting, and tried to contact the author.
I had also come across a handful of prisoners’ memoirs, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, hanging around in the back shelves of public libraries, often with sensationalised jackets. The cover for a memoir by a French literature teacher, Micheline Maurel, showed a voluptuous Bond-girl lookalike behind barbed wire. A book about Irma Grese, one of the early Ravensbrück guards, was titled
The Beautiful Beast
. The language of these memoirs seemed dated and, at first, unreal. One writer talked of ‘lesbians with brutish faces’ and another of the ‘bestiality’ of German prisoners, which ‘gave much food for thought as to the fundamental virtue of the race’. These texts were disorientating; it was as if nobody knew quite how to tell the story. In a preface to one memoir, the French writer François Mauriac wrote that Ravensbrück was ‘an abomination that the world has resolved to forget’. Perhaps I should write about something else. I went to see Yvonne Baseden, the only survivor I was then aware was still living, to ask her view.