If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (108 page)

When
Maisie handed over
her list it was the first the Swedes knew of the presence in Ravensbrück of any British or American women. Maisie had only been able to remember eight names, out of about twenty altogether. When the Swedes returned next day and asked Suhren to produce these eight names, he at first denied they existed. One of the Gestapo liaison officers, a man called Danziger, then pressed Suhren to come clean and hand the women over. It was not Danziger who persuaded Suhren to change his mind, however, but Percival Treite.

In these last weeks of the war several prisoners had observed Treite as he sought to ingratiate himself with the British prisoners, in the hope, presumably, that they might testify in his favour when the time came.

His hypocrisy sickened most of the British. He had done nothing to prevent Mary O’Shaughnessy being sent to the Youth Camp, nor to prevent the gassings of Cicely Lefort or Mary Young. But while most viewed Treite with disgust, Mary Lindell – his ‘Queen Mary’ – was not among them. Mary’s obsequiousness towards Treite, and the salacious rumours about the
favours she was granting him, had alienated her from almost all her compatriots by the last days of the war. On the other hand, as Mary would point out, she had won some favours too, in particular where Yvonne Baseden was concerned. Without Treite’s protection, granted at Mary’s request, there can be little doubt that Yvonne, who was dying of TB, would have been gassed.

When the question of the British releases was put before Suhren, and Treite heard the argument it caused, he saw his chance to intervene, and to do the biggest favour yet for Mary and the British women. He entered Suhren’s office and persuaded the commandant that releasing the British women would serve more purpose than keeping them hostage. Perhaps, he suggested, Mary Lindell might even put a word in for the commandant too. After hearing Treite out, Suhren
sent for Mary Lindell
. A voice outside the
Revier
shouted: ‘
Die Engländerin Marie, die Engländerin Marie
.’ Mary was sitting with Yvonne, who could barely move without coughing blood and weighed just 35 kilos. Hearing her name called, Mary got up to leave. Yvonne tried to stop her, fearing the worst, but Mary wanted to see why she was being called.

When she reached the Appellplatz, Mary saw Suhren waiting outside to talk to her. The commandant was leaning on a bicycle. His first words to her were ‘Do you trust me?’ to which Mary retorted: ‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’ Suhren told Mary to gather up all the English women and bring them to his office. He told her that ‘Dr Treite had suggested all the English and Americans should be freed.’ Mary put the word out to the British group, and very soon they were assembled beside the
Revier
, with the understanding that they too were to go on the White Buses.

According to the accounts of several British survivors, given later, it was only thanks to one of the Swedish leaders,
Sven Frykman
, that they weren’t all left behind. Frykman spotted their group and asked who they were. On being told they were British and Americans, he collected them himself and put them on the bus.

Mary Lindell had a slightly different version. She described how as she was marched towards the buses Suhren picked her out. He had apparently changed his mind yet again, and told Mary that she must stay behind after all. Yvonne saw what happened, and said that she would not go if Mary could not go too. ‘Don’t be such a fool, Yvonne,’ said Mary. ‘Go on, for God’s sake, before it’s too late.’ At this point, said Mary, Yvonne walked towards the buses, tears pouring down her cheeks. Treite saw that Mary had been sent back to the camp. He erupted in fury, marched Mary in person to the White Buses, and put her on board himself.

Yvonne’s memory differs again. She recalls being told by Mary Lindell that she had to leave her bed in the
Revier
and get herself to the Red Cross bus. ‘She said it was our last chance, we had to try and get out.’ Yvonne
walked towards the camp gate and lined up with some others. Too sick to be aware of anything much, she doesn’t remember if the other women were English or not.

I just remember
Mary told me to keep walking towards the buses. That is what I did. So I just attached myself to these people and kept walking and avoided any contact with the guards or anything like that. I remember being very worried that I might be stopped at any minute. I was very afraid of not getting on the bus, but I got on it. And we drove off at great speed. The drivers were very worried about not getting through because the front was now so close. I learned later that I was on the last bus.

As the twenty White Buses sped away, carrying 934 women, the drivers once again split up as a precaution. Some came under Russian artillery fire, but this time no one was hurt. Red Cross parcels were handed out and nurses tried to tend the sick. They passed two White Buses lying in a ditch, the ones shot up two days before. Somewhere along the route a German ‘spy’ was unveiled on board one of the buses, and on another a baby was born. The baby was nicknamed ‘Per Albin’, after the Swedish prime minister.

For the drivers this convoy was ‘one long nightmare’ as they threaded through swelling crowds of refugees. But inside the buses the Poles began to sing, as they saw the misery of the Germans, ‘and we cheered and hung little Polish flags up at the windows,’ said Maria Rundo. ‘When the buses slowed down young German boys tried to rip down the flags and shook their fists.’ The buses came up close to German hospital trains – so close that they could talk to the injured soldiers. ‘They asked us for cigarettes and chocolates, which we gave them from our Red Cross parcels. And when we drove through Kiel and saw the terrible destruction it filled us with joy.’

Yvonne remembers little of the journey through Germany, but she remembers arriving at the Danish border and being greeted by members of the Danish royal family. And it was only when she was safely across the border that she discovered that Mary had managed to get onto one of the buses after all.

As Treite had hoped, Mary Lindell later spoke up for him at his trial, and submitted a plea for clemency when in February 1947 he was sentenced to hang. Mary was not the only prisoner to plead for Treite’s life. Among the others was Yvonne Baseden herself. Her plea, submitted to the Hamburg judges read:

I believe that
Dr P Treite was mainly responsible for the safe evacuation of the British and American prisoners on the last convoy of the Swedish
Red Cross in April 1945. Orders had been given that we were to be kept as hostages and it is only through Dr P Treite and the Lagerführer’s help that we were evacuated with this last convoy. Furthermore, during my stay in the camp from September 1944 to April 1945 I came before Dr P Treite as a patient twice and on both occasions he treated me quite decently. I therefore plead clemency on his behalf.

When I asked Yvonne how the plea for clemency had come about, she explained that she had still been too weak to attend Treite’s trial in Hamburg in 1946, but while Treite was awaiting execution she had received a letter from Mary asking her to say something to spare him the hangman’s rope.

‘Mary certainly believed Treite had saved her own life,’ said Yvonne.

‘Do you think he saved your life?’

‘I think he made sure I was put on the bus. Otherwise I might not have got out. I was very weak by then.’

I asked if she believed that Treite should have been granted clemency, as she had requested.

‘You see, I didn’t know very much at that time. I had been so ill in the camp. I was grateful to Mary and did as she asked.’

I wondered how Yvonne felt when she learned that Treite had killed himself. Two weeks after the appeals for clemency were rejected, he cut his wrists and was found dead in his cell.

Yvonne was silent for a while. ‘I can see now he helped us to save his own skin. But without him I would probably not be here now.’

Chapter 41

Liberation

‘E
verything is on fire
. Looting is in full swing. Women’s screams are heard from open windows,’ wrote the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman as he observed the Red Army cross the German border and push towards Berlin in the first months of 1945.

Grossman had travelled with the Red Army forces all the way from Stalingrad. The Soviet columns were an extraordinary sight: a mixture of the modern and the medieval, their tanks with black-helmeted drivers churned forward alongside Cossacks on horseback, Chevrolets carrying mortars, and horses and carts carrying loot and supplies, and even accordion players. Grossman had watched Stalin’s armies roll back Hitler’s forces, liberate destroyed cities and overrun the death camps, exposing their gruesome secrets.

When the Red Army crossed into Germany, however, the soldiers’ discipline went to pieces. Incited by cries for vengeance, a million drunken
frontiviki
(frontline troops) began to loot, murder and rape. ‘Horrible things are happening to German women,’ wrote Grossman, who was clearly disgusted by the rape, condoned by many senior officers.

The troops raped and then raped again. ‘An educated German is explaining in broken Russian that his wife has already been raped by ten men today,’ wrote Grossman. A breast-feeding mother spoke of being raped in a barn. ‘Her relatives came and asked her attackers to let her have a break, because the hungry baby was crying the whole time.’ The Soviet troops did not only rape German women. They raped Poles, French and even Soviet women who fell in the
frontiviki
’s path. These victims were usually young slave labourers, brought here to work in German farms and factories.

By the middle of April, as Soviet columns rolled on west, terrified refugees passed through Fürstenberg, recounting what they’d seen, so by the end of the month, most of the town’s people had fled too.

In Ravensbrück all SS wives and families had been evacuated. Many SS men were permanently drunk and talking openly of the need to head towards the relative safety of American lines, or better still, to vanish. Most had already packed civilian clothes and decided on a civilian identity. Suhren, however, was vacillating about when to give the evacuation order. With several thousand prisoners still in the camp, the commandant was left at a loss.

The Führer’s clear instructions had been to evacuate them all, and kill any who couldn’t walk. No prisoners were to fall into enemy hands. But with links to Berlin severed and Hitler holed up in his bunker, Suhren had no new orders. His own superiors – Höss, Glücks, Himmler himself – were fleeing the advancing fronts and could no longer be contacted. As commandant of one of the few camps still not overrun, he was on his own. The fate of the last remaining Ravensbrück women lay in his hands.

The Swedish White Buses had already taken most of the west European prisoners and many Poles and Jewish women. That left the Russians, Germans, Austrians and East Europeans, amongst them still a large number of Jews. Many of these prisoners predicted that Suhren would order a massacre. Others believed the camp was mined, or that they really would be marched to the Baltic coast – the only escape route – put on boats and drowned. As for those too weak to walk, Suhren had threatened many times to shoot anyone unable to join the evacuation.

On 27 April came news that forces of Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front had taken Prenzlau, fifty miles to the east. The German army now blew up fuel depots and military bases around Fürstenberg, ready for the final retreat. Suhren’s men started setting fire to workshops at the back of the compound while Suhren and Binz were seen ‘black with soot and sweat’ frantically burning more papers. Hans Pflaum cycled around the camp, selecting more women to exterminate. ‘Pflaum hunted down the weak and sick prisoners from their blocks and then shot them on the Lagerstrasse,’ said Zdenka Nedvedova.

Other last-minute killings went on. A German prisoner, Anni Sinderman, recalled a group of evacuees brought in just before the end. ‘They were lying on the floor in the bathhouse whimpering and whining.’ These women were not seen again, says Anni. Possibly they were killed in the gas van, or simply shot. Odette Sansom, still held as a hostage in her bunker cell, saw live prisoners driven into the crematorium. ‘
I could hear them
screaming and struggling and I heard the oven doors being opened and shut. Then I didn’t see the women any more.’

On the question of the final massacre, Suhren could not decide how far to go. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier noted in her diary that orders were ‘changing every two hours’. One minute the SS announced that all those incapable of marching would be killed and the camp swept clean before the Russians arrived. The next minute Suhren was issuing instructions that the sick could stay and the rest would march.

As Pflaum was shooting women outside, Dr Treite called the prisoner doctors to his office. He asked who would stay behind after the evacuation to care for the sick until the Russians arrived. Several women told Treite they would remain, including the prominent communists Zdenka Nedvedova, Antonina Nikiforova and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier.

And even if Suhren had intended to kill all the old and sick, how would he have destroyed the bodies in time? The Führer had also ordered that all evidence be eradicated before the enemy arrived, but the crematorium couldn’t burn bodies fast enough, as the Austrian prisoner secretary Friederike Kierdorf discovered when she saw inside.

Friederike was still working in the
Schreibstube
, filling in details on prisoners’ cards, until the very last minute.

But then suddenly we were told to put the cards down and burn the lot. We were told the office was to be destroyed and we had to take all the last dossiers in trunks to the crematorium for burning. Inside the crematorium there were three ovens, which we now saw for the first time. But as we stood there with the trunks the men working the ovens told us: ‘We can’t burn paper because we’re burning people.’ One of them told us: ‘We burn sixteen thin ones or four fat ones in one oven.’ So we had to carry the documents away again and burn them in sandpits.