If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (132 page)

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Authors: Sarah Helm

BOOK: If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

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Epilogue

633	‘I don’t want to burn …’ : Mant report, WO 309/416. Seeing the arrivals, an American diplomat sent a cable to Washington describing women ‘in appalling condition … starved and beaten. Still 5000 left at Ravensbrück and refugees believe Germans will exterminate them en masse when the camp is threatened. Many lives would be saved if camp could be taken by surprise attack.’ Cable 1621 from S. Johnson in Stockholm to Secretary of State Washington, DC, received 1 May 1945, NARA.
633	‘a very cheerful lady …’ : FO 372/50982.
634	last transport to Belsen : Yvonne Rudellat, the Prosper circuit woman, died at Belsen a few days after liberation. As many as 15,000 men, women and children died at Belsen in the two weeks after liberation, many of typhoid and starvation. Soon after arriving at Malmö Yvonne Baseden was flown back to Scotland, then took a train to London where Vera Atkins met her at Euston Station. Eileen Nearne, the other SOE woman at Ravensbrück, who in the last days had escaped from an evacuation march near Leipzig, reached American lines and eventually returned home. She died in Torquay in 2010. For the story of the search for missing SOE women see See Sarah Helm, A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (London: Little, Brown, 2005).
635	‘took part in the selection …’ : Chechko, GARF.
636	‘By this time …’ : Author interview and Fyffe’s diaries. I interviewed Angus Fyffe about Vera Atkins at his home in Scotland in 2003. He also read out extracts from his extensive diaries recounting with wry humour how as a young Scottish major he had hunted down war criminals in the rubble of post-war Germany. The diaries are now in the IWM.
637	‘might have stepped out …’ : Tickell, Odette . In a diary kept during the hearing Syliva Salvesen describes Winkelmann ‘sitting with his head in his hands’ and Marshall showing ‘rage and despair’, while Carmen Mory ‘looks insolent and sometimes laughs hysterically’. Salvesen archives, Norges Hjemmefrontmuseet.
637	acquired – it was said – by selling gold teeth : The extraordinary story of Salvequart’s shenanigans while on the run from war crimes hunters in the chaos of Allied-occupied Germany (including getting a job with American counter-intelligence and blackmailing Nazi suspects – see Atkins papers) is matched only by Carmen Mory’s escapades. Mory was hired by British intelligence and posted as an informer in a UN refugee camp, until a young British investigator called Hugh Trevor-Roper uncovered her true story, describing her as ‘a very undesirable person indeed’. TNA investigation files.
641	Not a single member : The head of Siemens, Hermann von Siemens, was arrested by the Americans in 1945 and remained in prison until 1948, though his arrest was not connected to his role at Siemens but to his position at Deutsche Bank. He was released without charge.
642	Anne Spoerry : According to a handwritten note on a page of the Hamburg trial transcript, Hélène Roussel, a French survivor, attended an ‘honour court’ in Paris in 1946, where Spoerry was summarily tried by former Free French. WO 235/317.
643	‘Nobody came to see me …’ : At the age of eighteen Stella left the orphanage and traced her father, who had remarried and was living in Brazil. By this time Antonina Nikiforova had befriended Stella, and Stella married Antonina’s adopted son Arkady. She lived with Arkady at Antonina’s St Petersburg flat, where she still lives today
643	‘All my life …’ : Georg Loonkin papers.
644	‘fighter against fascism’ : Rupp and Wiedmaier, BStU files
645	The company reluctantly paid out : Benjamin Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor, describes his battle to get Siemens to pay up in Less Than Slaves .
645	pitiful sentences : There were no West German trials between 1949 and 1989 concerning crimes commited by female SS guards in Ravensbrück. A handful of women guards were tried at the Majdanek trial in Dusseldorf between 1975 and 1981. One, Hermine Braunsteiner, who had been tracked down to New York by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, was sentenced to life imprisonment but was freed in 1996 for health reasons. She died in 1999.
646	question the existence of gas chambers : In 1968, the French historian Olga Wormser-Migot produced a study on the Nazi camps in which she claimed there was no proof that gas chambers existed anywhere on German soil.
649	‘Forget it …’ : See Sarah Helm, ‘The Nazi Guard’s Untold Love Story’, Sunday Times Magazine , 5 August 2007.
651	almost certainly too high : For details of how the British prosecutors arrived at their figure of 90,000 dead, see the interim report on the Ravensbrück investigation, WO 235/316.

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