If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (147 page)

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British intelligence also foiled an attempt by communist protesters to get Olga off the steamer when it docked at Southampton en route to Hamburg. Moscow had signalled in advance to the British Communist Party in London, calling for protests to be organised at the port, but the signal was intercepted by MI6 and the steamer went straight to Germany without docking anywhere.

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For example, all Gypsies in Berlin had been rounded up before the Olympics began. In order to remove them from public view they were herded into a vast camp built on a swamp in the Berlin suburb of Marzhan.

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Tens of thousands of German-Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps after Kristallnacht, but Jewish women had not been rounded up, probably for fear of creating a backlash and because there was not enough room for them behind bars at this time.

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According to prisoner secretaries, by the time the camp was liberated five years later some prisoner files contained enough paperwork to cover three square metres.

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In contrast, prisoners at Himmler’s new male concentration camps of Mauthausen and Flossenbürg worked in quarries, hacking out granite to rebuild Berlin as Hitler’s new fantasy capital Germania.

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The pages of the Fürstenberg church record book covering the war years have been torn out, almost certainly by Märker, in order to cover up his activities.

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Today Anita speaks no word of German and has had her mother’s letters translated into Portuguese.

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These terms were not invented by the Nazis: other expressions such as ‘empty human husks’ and ‘ballast lives’ had been common in the science of eugenics in Germany and many other countries, notably the United States, since the nineteenth century.

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Neumann was Grete’s second husband. He was Jewish, as was her first husband Rafel Buber, the son of the Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber. Grete’s sister Babette also married a Jew. ‘Maybe the fact that they both married Jews was some sort of protest against their father,’ says Judith Buber Agassi, Grete’s daughter. ‘Their narrow-minded father [the director of a Potsdam brewery] did not like the Jews.’

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From Swabia, a region of south-west Germany.

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According to Maria Bielicka, a Polish prisoner, prostitutes from the asocial blocks sometimes had contacts with men in the small male camp. ‘They knew how to do this. One was caught and was put in the bunker and given twenty-five lashes.’

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Häschen’s parents were unhappy about their daughter’s liaison with Himmler, so she insisted that the relationship be conducted in secret.

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Schmuckstücke
was also ironic.
Schmuck
means jewellery, or trinket, so
Schmuckstück
is a piece of jewellery.
Schmuck
is also Yiddish for ‘poor man’, which might explain its use here too. Guards more often just called prisoners
Stücke
– simply ‘pieces’.

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Some German prisoners were reportedly paid one Reichsmark a day for their work in the sewing sheds: enough to pay for a little fish paste or perhaps some shrimps, which by then was just about all that was for sale in the prisoner shop.

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Stephen Stewart was born Stefan Strauss. He fled Austria for England just before the Anschluss.

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Chorążnya also organised to sabotage the knitting, splitting thread so holes would appear in soldiers’ gloves and socks. Maria Bielicka described her as ‘like a little mouse. Sitting there. A very strong little mouse. She organised everything.’

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Undercover agents working behind the lines for Allied forces – agents of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) for example – were also sometimes, though not always, sentenced to death then sent on to camps.

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Pressure to find a miracle drug increased when the Allies started dropping leaflets over German lines, announcing that their soldiers were being treated with sulphonamides and penicillin.

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Hitler backed the experiments on concentration camp prisoners, saying they ‘ought not to remain completely unaffected by the war while German soldiers are being subjected to almost unbearable strain and our native land, women and children, are being engulfed under a rain of incendiary bombs’.

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Murder by lethal injection was commonplace in all concentration camps and was still widely used to kill lives not worth living in German sanatoria under the so-called euthanasia programme.

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Klemm would also have known of the 1907 Hague Convention, which the USSR had signed and which protected POWs and limited their use as forced labour. However, both Hitler and Stalin in equal measure made a mockery of ‘rules of war’, whether signed or not signed. Germany had signed the Geneva and Hague conventions, but German forces slaughtered an estimated 3.5 million captured Soviet troops.

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Though killer disease was widespread in the camp, prisoners rarely complained of colds or flu. When fleeing the Germans on the Eastern Front, Ida Grinberg, a Red Army doctor, slept on branches of fur trees laid on the snow. ‘We didn’t get colds then either.’ Ida also observed that men were usually much weaker physically, ‘and I believe they had a weaker will than women’.

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Kulaks were prosperous peasants; many of them were liquidated in the 1920s and 1930s during the Bolshevik drive to collectivise farms.

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Ilena Barsukova’s is a rare description of women crying. ‘I saw very few tears in the camp. For some reason people didn’t cry,’ said Anna Stekolnikova.

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Selma was Jewish, and on joining the Dutch resistance took on the name and identity of Margareta van der Kuit, a non-Jewish baby who had died at birth. The number of Jewish prisoners at Ravensbrück who never revealed their true identity cannot be known, but probably runs into the hundreds.

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In fact, mass sterilisation experiments had been due to start at Ravensbrück in the summer of 1942. On 10 July 1942 Rudolf Brandt, on behalf of Himmler, wrote an
officially secret letter
to Carl Clauberg, the sterilisation expert, asking him to go to Ravensbrück ‘to perform sterilisation of Jewesses according to your method’. Clauberg didn’t come, however, choosing to experiment (for the time being) at Auschwitz instead.

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In evidence, Ramdohr said later that Milena Jesenska had come to him and revealed the crimes of Rosenthal and Quernheim including lethal injections and abortions. ‘On searching the sick bay, I myself discovered a human embryo in alcohol which, according to Quernheim’s statement, was her own.’ It was a result of Ramdohr’s investigation that Rosenthal was dismissed and Quernheim put in the bunker.

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The spy in the hospital was the Swiss prisoner Carmen Mory, who had by this time been transferred from the main camp – where she had been Blockova of Block 10, to spend the last months of the war as one of Ramdohr’s spies at Barth.

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Revier
workers noticed that Treite’s patients were also dying because of simple mistakes during operations. Treite was using more and more untrained assistants. One gave a patient an anaesthetic one tenth of the correct solution and the other gave a solution ten times the normal strength. Both patients died. Bozena Boudova also noticed a rise in demand for lethal serum: ‘I saw Dr Treite in the pharmacy filling a syringe with this solution.’

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Once in England, Isa’s brother Erich had begun to broadcast against Hitler on the BBC and also wrote propaganda leaflets which were dropped over Germany by British and American planes. ‘As a result of this,’ Isa said, ‘I was arrested and put into Ravensbrück. My father and mother and another brother were also arrested and went to Sachsenhausen.’

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When Karolina’s copy of Tacitus arrived, Binz informed her that the commandant had confiscated it because it contained ‘Catholic prayers’. Puzzled, Karolina asked to see the book, which was in fact Petrarch’s sonnets. She explained to Binz these were not Catholic prayers but love poems, and she was allowed to have the book. ‘So ended what I am sure was Binz’s only encounter with Petrarch,’ commented Karolina later. ‘Presumably the phrase “Madonna mia” gave rise to the error.’

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Elisabeth Thury, a social democrat and journalist, had been arrested in Vienna on the first day of the war for anti-Nazi activity. At Ravensbrück, she had been picked for work sorting out the filing system in the camp clothes store, and graduated to head of the camp police in 1943. Isa Vermehren, the bunker hostage, said Thury was ‘power-hungry and vulgar’ and her ‘blows were feared’. She had ‘a big head, grey hair in a men’s style’ and sometimes conducted a camp choir ‘with savage sentimentality’. Others said Thury managed to protect prisoners from a certain amount of SS violence.

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One such gang was the ‘
Holy Ghost-Kommando
’. According to the prisoner Joanna Baumann, the five-prisoner gang ‘dealt with prisoners who stole from others or betrayed them’. For example, a prostitute from Dortmund who made others do her heavy work was beaten up.

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Such was the level of sickness at Siemens in February 1944 that Richard Trommer, the head doctor, paid an
unprecedented visit
to the plant, though his intention was not to treat the sick but to weed out the weakest-looking women before important visitors arrived. Two days after Trommer’s inspection a high-level delegation from Berlin came to inspect the Siemens works.

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According to Wanda Wojtasik, when the Poles of Block 15 were lined up and asked to volunteer there was ‘thunderous silence’, until one stepped forward to boos and hisses. Wanda led a delegation to protest to the commandant, who ‘gaped at us and didn’t know what to do’, eventually cancelling the protestors’ parcels. Meanwhile, Irena Dragan and nine others – mostly rabbits – cut off the hair of the volunteer and beat her up. ‘I took the scissors,’ said Irena. Four of the beaters were given twenty-five lashes for ‘punishing’ the volunteer.

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The hated Kapo Käthe Knoll had by now joined the camp police.

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This was Robert Benoist, the SOE agent who was arrested with Denise in France. Benoist was taken to Buchenwald where he was executed in October, a few weeks after Denise had arrived at Ravensbrück. Also executed at Buchenwald in October were the other eight French section SOE men who had travelled on the same train as the SOE women.

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Mory particularly hated Elisabeth Thury, who as head of the camp police was the only other prisoner with real power. In interrogations after the war Mory devoted pages to attacking Thury, implicating her in the ‘French jewellery affair’ – a scam involving theft of prisoners’ jewels – in which Thury had got the better of Mory.

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Germaine Tillion said later that Annie de Montfort had called for an ‘imaginary chaffeur’ just minutes before the end.

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An estimated 18,200 disabled and mentally ill Germans and Austrians were gassed at Castle Hartheim. An early victim was Hans Rosenberg, a first cousin of Vera Atkins, the SOE staff officer, who had been taken to Castle Hartheim in 1940 from a mental hospital in Vienna.

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When Aka eventually reached the United States in late 1944
she gave interviews
to several newspapers and broadcasters, in which she described the conditions in Ravensbrück and the medical experiments in detail.

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Bernard Dufournier got wind of this plan. On 11 January he received a letter from the Swedish mission in Paris, which he had contacted about Denise, saying that the Vice President of the Swedish Red Cross ‘is at this moment very interested in doing something for the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. He wishes to send parcels and send a delegate. I can’t promise anything,’ wrote a Swedish official.

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Bernadotte also had a personal interest in France; as a direct descendant of the Napoleonic marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte he had a great deal of French blood.

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Anton Kaindl, commandant of Sachsenhausen, revealed later that his first orders, received on 19 April, had been to liquidate the camp by embarking all prisoners into barges lying in the western harbour of Berlin and taking them up the canals into the North Sea to be sunk. He refused, and was told to march the prisoners out instead.

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Two Siemens directors, both SS members, committed suicide in 1945, no doubt because they anticipated war crimes trials. Otto Grade, the Siemens manager at Ravensbrück, disappeared without trace.

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The Stasi also kept a file on Grete Buber-Neumann. Her ground-breaking book
Under Two Dictators
(1948) revealed in greater detail than anyone to date the horrors of Stalin’s Gulag camps and was naturally banned in the East. Even today, the work has not been translated into Russian.

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Not her real name: she wishes to remain anonymous.

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Gedenkort also made the wire-mesh figures, called Maschas, and placed them at the site.

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Germany’s central office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes at Ludwigsberg has also recently ruled that Ravensbrück was ‘not a death camp’. For this reason, the office is no longer investigating crimes committed by guards or SS officers at Ravensbrück; it is only investigating crimes at death camps. Absurdly, this ruling means that none of the crimes connected with the Ravensbrück extermination will be investigated. When Ravensbrück women guards moved on to work at a ‘death camp’, however, their crimes there can be investigated, and the central office is currently investigating alleged crimes committed by a small number of Ravensbrück guards while they were working at Majdanek.