If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (100 page)

Another dilemma faced the mission. Throughout March it had not been possible for Bernadotte’s buses to rescue the women of Ravensbrück. Sylvia Salvesen had
smuggled out letters
in early March that told of hundreds of corpses burned each day at the camp. Sylvia also warned that liquidation might occur ‘within three weeks’. The way from Hamburg was still passable by road; Bernadotte’s buses could at least have collected Ravensbrück’s Scandinavian women. And yet, while they rescued the men, the women were having to wait till last. Why?

Bernadotte’s memoir is silent on the subject, and so are the Swedish foreign ministry papers. But the answer lies, almost certainly, in the fact that to carry out his mission at all, Bernadotte was bound by Himmler’s terms, and Himmler had not yet given permission for the White Buses to go to Ravensbrück.

Even as Himmler and Bernadotte first met on 10 February at Hohenlychen to discuss the first stage of the rescue, the gassing at Ravensbrück, eight miles down the road, was under way. By the end of March the extermination hit its peak. Anyone coming to the camp in that time would have smelt the choking brown smoke, and seen trucks packed with bodies. Local villagers were even complaining about the ash in the lake. At the other camps visited by the White Buses, gassing was not being carried out, so the rescues could start. But Himmler had decided that Bernadotte could not come to Ravensbrück until most of the gassing was done.

Whether Bernadotte was aware of the reasons for his exclusion remains unclear; there is certainly no evidence to suggest that he pressed for permission to go to Ravensbrück in the first weeks. What is clear, however, is that by the time he drove out to Hohenlychen for his second meeting with Himmler on 4 April, the gassing at the women’s camp had begun to slow down. Probably the gassing vans alone were still in use, and they could move around and be easily hidden in the woods.

At first the chances of new concessions from Himmler did not look good. When he appeared this time the Reichsführer was ‘
not only grave, but nervy
’, Bernadotte recalled. Himmler spoke again of his duty to the Führer. At one point he got up to take a call and left the room, at which Walter Schellenberg, who was always present at these meetings, turned to Bernadotte and told him what was on the Reichsführer’s mind.

Himmler wished the count to act as an intermediary with the Allies and go directly to Eisenhower to say that Himmler wished to negotiate an armistice on the Western front. Schellenberg said that Himmler had found himself unable to make this request directly to Bernadotte, and had left him to do it. Bernadotte replied by making clear to Schellenberg that the Western powers would not negotiate with Himmler and he could not offer himself as an intermediary.

When Himmler returned to the room, Bernadotte saw his chance to ask for the concessions he was seeking on the prisoner rescues. First, he asked for permission to take all the Scandinavians now held at Neuengamme straight to Denmark. Himmler said this was not possible, because Hitler would get to know, and would veto it. Himmler made his own counter-offer: ‘Moving smaller numbers might be possible.’ Bernadotte now proposed the release of all Norwegian and Swedish women – as well as Norwegian students and some Danes – direct to Sweden. Himmler agreed.

Perhaps because he judged that Himmler had conceded as much as he was willing for now, Bernadotte did not push his luck by asking for the French as well, as he had intended. But significant gains had been made: in particular, the White Buses could now head to Ravensbrück.

Bernadotte passed the news to his mission leaders and the Ravensbrück rescue date was set for 7 April. Before the Swedish buses set out, however, they learned that the Swiss had reached the women’s camp first. In a further letter from Sylvia Salvesen, smuggled out on 4 April, Sylvia spoke of 400 French women ‘fetched today by the Swiss International Red Cross’.

Given that for six years the International Committee of the Red Cross had refused to take a stand on the concentration camps, the appearance of their rescue buses outside Ravensbrück in early April was, as the prisoners themselves would say, ‘a miracle’. It was, in part, a matter of mere rivalry. Learning that their rival neutrals, the Swedes, were launching a dramatic rescue mission, the Swiss didn’t want to be outshone. Carl Burckhardt, the acting ICRC president, had his legacy in mind and had requested his own meeting with Himmler to discuss the camps.

The intervention signalled just how fast Geneva’s attitudes had changed in the final weeks of war. Reports about what Hitler had planned for his prisoners in the last days exerted overwhelming pressure on the ICRC to act. Throughout January and February national Red Cross societies – Czech, Polish, Yugoslav, Greek, Romanian, French, British and American – had been urging the International Red Cross to take a lead. The World Jewish Congress was pressing hardest of all, horrified by what fate awaited those Jews left alive in German camps. De Gaulle’s provisional government in France also pressed the ICRC to get off the fence, and the US State Department was calling for it to ‘use every means at its disposal’.

Most communications were cut and roads impassable, but if the Swedes could do it, why not the Swiss? An opening appeared when Himmler – keeping the Swiss in play as well as the Swedes – accepted a suggestion from Burckhardt for a prisoner swap: 300 French women held at Ravensbrück to be exchanged for German civilian prisoners held in France. The deal was done in early March, but amid the chaos it proved hard to implement. It was largely thanks to the influence and contacts of a Swiss doctor that the exchange got off the ground at all.

Thirty-two-year-old Dr Hans Meyer, born in Zurich, had been appointed an ICRC delegate in Germany in January 1945. On the face of things he was an appropriate person to oversee the prisoner exchange, but his prior employment made him a breathtaking choice.
Before joining the ICRC
he had worked for two years as a doctor for the SS, based at the Hohenlychen clinic, where his chief was Karl Gebhardt, the man who – as the ICRC knew – had carried out medical atrocities at Ravensbrück.

Why, as the war drew to an end, Meyer suddenly left the SS clinic to take
up a job as an ICRC delegate is easier to understand than how a man who had worked as an SS doctor came to be appointed as an ICRC delegate. Meyer must have known about – if not taken part in – Gebhardt’s crimes. Now, however, Meyer turned his zeal to helping the other side as he tried to secure the 300 Ravensbrück prisoners’ release, and his SS contacts soon proved indispensable.

When Meyer turned up at Ravensbrück to make arrangements he found that Suhren was away and no one knew a thing about the exchange. By this time the pace of the Red Army advance was about to make routes to the Swiss border impassable. In view of this Meyer drove the five miles up to Hohenlychen to see if his old SS friends could help speed things up. Only by direct appeal to Himmler – presumably arranged by Meyer’s old boss, Gebhardt – was Meyer able to instruct the Swiss drivers to approach the camp and was Suhren finally instructed to release the women.

On arrival at Ravensbrück on 1 April, however, the Swiss drivers were still made to wait. The reason given was that the women had not yet been selected and properly prepared. The reason not given was that there was still some gassing and burning to be done. So the Swiss Red Cross buses parked a little way back in the trees, and waited for three more days.

The day that the buses turned up, word spread among the French in the camp that everyone was to gather next morning at the gates, but no confirmation came. All that night excitement and fear ran in conflicting waves through the French blocks. Someone in the offices had seen the Red Cross buses. The French Siemens workers had been brought to the main camp and the few surviving French from the Youth Camp had been brought back too.

Binz was going round the camp trying to tidy things up ‘as if she was expecting visitors’. She told staff in the
Revier
to shut the broken windows so that missing panes didn’t show. ‘And lock the
Schmuckstücke
in washrooms,’ shouted the
Oberaufseherin
.

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier noted in her diary for that day: ‘
The sick were sent
to the gas chamber yesterday and today we get on their behalf their share of Ovaltine as an Easter treat!’ In another French block prisoners spent the day chatting around the stove, warming their Easter drinks, as truckloads of bodies continued to trundle past. ‘Is that one French?’ asked someone, perhaps recognising a face. ‘No, Polish,’ came the answer. ‘You can only die once,’ said a girl called Lily. ‘But we mustn’t die in Ravensbrück’ – on that they were all agreed.

When the women went to their bunks, the Blockova shouted out: ‘Tomorrow morning all the French at
Appell
at nine.’

As the French lined up, it was a horribly familiar sight. A selection took
place, conducted by the cattle merchant. First, Pflaum picked out 400 French and moved them to one side. Then the same group were told they were to be selected again. Now 200 were picked out – but again no one knew why some were chosen and some not. Then others, not chosen the first two times, were told they had been selected after all, and the numbers rose again. Among those not selected at all were the most acutely sick and feeble – clearly the sight of these dying women would not redound to Germany’s credit. The NN (Night and Fog) group were also not to be released.

Many of those not selected were relieved, as they knew that ‘selection’ was likely to lead to something worse. When they saw the chosen women led off to Block 31, inside the enclosure, where prisoners once waited to go to the Youth Camp, such fears intensified. Here the women were kept for fortyeight hours and made to pass twice through the showers, then left naked and shivering in the cold, ‘filled with anxiety, fear and hope’, until they were given new sets of ill-fitting clothes. Denise Dufournier inherited an evening dress, which she thought must have been used in a Polish cabaret. The women were then kept waiting in a wet block for three days.

On the third day, 3 April, came new torment: the women were called out and Suhren took a roll-call, at the end of which he selected all those with aristocratic names and told them to return to their blocks. The aristocrats were to stay behind, but the rest, he said, would be freed the next day.

The aristocrats, guessing, rightly, that they were to be held as hostages, gathered in anger and a three-woman protest ‘committee’ – Christiane de Cuverville, Colette de Dumast and Jacqueline d’Alincourt – went to see Suhren to ask for an explanation. Colette did all the talking, as she spoke the best German. ‘
She asked Binz
why we were not allowed to leave, and Binz looked astonished at being spoken to like that,’ Christiane recalled. The chief guard then placed a piece of paper on the desk. If the titled ladies of France agreed to sign the paper saying they had been ‘well treated’, they would not be executed, she announced. ‘We were horrified. Colette said there was no question of that,’ said Christiane. As they returned to their block the three debated whether to tell the other ‘aristocrats’ of the offer. ‘Colette said let’s not tell them. So we decided not to in case there might be one or two who would sign,’ said Jacqueline d’Alincourt.

Next morning – Wednesday 4 April – those still on the list were told to prepare to leave, and new names were added to fill the spaces of those removed, including a handful from Block 10. With the help of Violette Lecoq, Loulou sought out Zim in the block where she’d been hidden and managed to help her to her feet and out to the
Appell
. At the last minute, Winkelmann appeared and picked out any woman with swollen legs, or with
head recently shaved. Zim, however, was overlooked and found the strength to walk with the others to the gates. As the women filed out – 299 in total, still in ranks of five – Suhren closed the gates behind them and wished the group ‘
bon voyage
’. He hoped they wouldn’t have a ‘disagreeable recollection’ of their stay at the camp.

The women looked ahead down the road. Half hidden in the pine trees about 1500 yards away, they saw a line of White Buses, each painted with a huge red cross. It seemed they had better walk on, and so they did, haltingly, staring ahead. Closer they saw soldiers in khaki standing beside the buses. A little closer still they saw the word Canada on the soldiers’ sleeves. These were Canadian prisoners of war, freed by the Germans to drive the buses as part of the deal.

The French women stared at the buses and at the men in khaki, ‘motionless and dazed’, recalled Denise. ‘I thought it was a dream,’ said Loulou. ‘Really, I did not believe it. It was surreal. We went forward and we saw soldiers – I think they were Canadians, and they cried when they saw us. When I saw them crying I began to think it was real.’

The women climbed inside the buses and the Canadians helped. Inside they were each given a piece of cake and a large piece of cold sausage. The vehicles started up and drove away. The women were told they were heading to Lake Constance and the Swiss border.

After the 299 French had gone, those left behind talked of who might go next. They knew that time for rescue was running out. The secretaries were holding daily bonfires burning documents and files. The front was closing fast, and with about 30,000 prisoners still held in Ravensbrück, orders to evacuate – or blow the camp up – were certain to come soon.

Sylvia Salvesen had given up hope. It was four weeks since the nurse Gerda Schröder had left, taking with her the second of Sylvia’s smuggled letters and promising to pass it on to Wanda Hjort and the Norwegian cell at Gross Kreutz. ‘She had been gone over a month and dreadful things had happened during those weeks,’ Sylvia recalled.

Then on the day the French left for Switzerland – 5 April – Gerda reappeared. She came to Sylvia’s bed that night, carrying a parcel and bringing news. Sylvia was astonished and overjoyed. Gerda was upset at the sight of her friend, who in four weeks had grown ravaged, white-haired and thin. She gave Sylvia the note sent back from Mrs Hjort and Mrs Seip, but Gerda had more recent news than this. She explained that after she left Ravensbrück in early March she’d been unable to get back to the camp due to the bombing of the train lines. Gerda had tried to get back to Gross Kreutz, but the lines to Potsdam were also bombed. On Easter Monday, however, Gerda
managed to telephone Gross Kreutz and arranged to meet Wanda Hjort in Berlin.