If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (18 page)

A number of them
were true monsters, and I was always afraid of them; morally they were completely ruined, and in addition they were sly and deceitful and therefore dangerous. Others were just children, outcasts from society who, under the terrors of the SS, could only get worse.

Some of the women were driven to such despair that they threw themselves on the wire, ‘and in the mornings their charred remains hung from the electric fence’. Bertha Teege, a German communist, saw such a body hanging from the wire the day she arrived in July 1940: ‘A young asocial from Vienna had attempted to escape. The body, still hanging, was shown to us as a deterrent.’

Bertha, who already knew other politicals here, soon secured an appointment as Blockova and was sent to Block 9, another asocials block. Here she took over from the ousted Munich
Puffmutter
Philomena Müssgueller, another coup victim, who had been thrown into the
Strafblock
. Teege found asocials on one side of her block and Gypsies on the other. Controlling them was a ‘Herculean task’, but she soon linked up with her old communist comrade Luise Mauer, now Blockova of the ‘notorious criminals block’, and together
‘we set right what we could
– got hold of certain things and never let them catch us’. The two had contacts with the ‘camp administration’.

The Gypsies, said Bertha Teege, were more controllable than the prostitutes. ‘The Gypsies are like dependent children, squabbling, fighting each other and then friends again.’ The asocials however were decrepit and unable to cope. More than 80 per cent had venereal disease as well as TB.

Who these asocial women were, however, Teege doesn’t say. Like her fellow politicals, she seems never to have asked a name. Apart from the early notorious Kapos like Müssgueller, Kaiser and Knoll, the camp’s common criminals and asocials almost never had names. By the SS and prisoners alike, these women were viewed as an anonymous mob. Prisoners used the SS
language to refer to them: they were ‘asocials’, ‘pests’, ‘hags’, or – as Grete said – ‘wild animals’.

Even when a black- or green-triangle Kapo is remembered for an act of kindness she is rarely granted a name, though Edith Sparmann did recall Goldhansi, as her Blockova was nicknamed. Goldhansi was kind to Edith, who was very young when she first arrived, and was split up from her mother. ‘Goldhansi found my mother for me and arranged for us to meet,’ said Edith. Goldhansi probably also lost her job in the coup.

Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.

The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.

As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch.’

Only in the 1990s did researchers begin to appeal for asocial survivors to come forward, but of the handful who responded, none gave real names, and none, they said, had been prostitutes themselves. Käthe Datz admitted to having been imprisoned as an asocial for being ‘work-shy’; she skipped off from her factory job one day to help her sick mother.

They said I was a traitor
and committed a crime. Then I was put on a mass transport so I cried. Amongst our group were many working girls – prostitutes. I remember them walking in their high heels across the cobbled
streets of Fürstenberg on the way to the camp. I can tell you how they went for those women: ‘You swines. We will teach you a lesson,’ and then came the kicking and the beating.

And yet, thanks to Nazi bureaucracy, a few clues have survived as to who these women were. So extensive was the police records system set up by Himmler so as to monitor and then exterminate Germany’s underclass that Bomber Command failed to destroy every file. Nowhere was this bureaucracy more extensive than in Cologne, which had one of the biggest red-light districts in Germany. In part because these women served the military, they were extensively monitored and controlled. The city was flattened by Allied bombs in 1942, but during the post-war clear-up a handful of random police files were dug from the rubble and stacked in archives in nearby Düsseldorf, where they have remained unread for nearly seventy years.

Here is Anna Sölzer’s file. Just twenty when her police photograph was taken in 1941, Anna was pretty, with a dark felt hat. Found living in a single room, she was arrested on suspicion of spreading venereal disease. She had no papers because they’d been destroyed when a house she was living in was bombed. The arresting officer found her alone in her room, ‘
but we know
men had been there,’ he noted. ‘At first she refused to get out of bed and go to the police station saying she didn’t want to.’

Anna was five months pregnant. She said she didn’t know the father. As pregnant women could not be imprisoned, she was put under curfew until the baby was born and then rearrested.

The file contains a statement Anna made as part of a report into the ‘genetic history’ of the family. She never knew her father. Her mother died when she was six. ‘I was in an orphanage until I was eight years old. I went to a house where I learned how to work in a family as a domestic help, but the money was so bad I went to work in a factory.’ Even there she only earned twenty marks a week, so she started to work as a prostitute. The police report found that Anna came from a ‘genetically worthless’ family and showed ‘
widerspenstiges freches Benehmen
’ – wilful, cheeky behaviour.

Anna told police she wanted to continue working as a prostitute until she had the baby. ‘I will find work for the sake of the child. I know the police are watching me. If I do something else bad I will go to the KZ.’ While she was pregnant she fell ill and went to the baby’s father for help. ‘But he was married and had a family.’ When the baby – Bodo – was born he was taken to a Cologne orphanage. Soon afterwards she was taken to Ravensbrück.

Also on Anna’s file is a telegram from the authorities at Ravensbrück to the Cologne Gestapo saying that at 16.00 on 28 December 1944 Anna died of TB. Tuberculosis was certainly prevalent in the camp, but by 1944 it was
often given as a cause of death to cover up murder. The Cologne Gestapo received the standard camp letter issued in such cases: ‘Please inform her family of the death. They cannot look at the body and it is not possible to have the ashes for reasons of hygiene.’ The Cologne Gestapo replied to KZ Ravensbrück saying that Anna’s only family was her son Bodo, who was now three. ‘The child will inherit. He is now living in an orphanage. Please send her possessions to him via the Cologne Youth Department.’

Ottile Gorres’s life story
also emerged from the rubble. Ottile was in care from the age of two. She was not employed when arrested and ‘drinks all day in pubs’, said the Gestapo interrogator, who found Ottile’s family to be ‘genetically flawed’. Items taken from her when she was admitted to the camp – a brooch and a comb – were awaiting collection, said a note. She had died in Ravensbrück.

More women’s faces stare out of more files, all telling similar stories. Elisabeth Fassbender grew up in a Cologne orphanage and was arrested for stealing a coat. She too died in Ravensbrück.

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.

Unused to following rules, the asocials were always more likely than most others to be picked on for some small crime such as failing to make a bed correctly, and then they’d be sent for a beating or to the
Strafblock
, returning in a far worse state. From Bertha Teege’s testimony it seems that some of the political Blockovas were as ready as the guards themselves to report asocial charges for crimes.

Bertha complains that there was nothing she could do to help these women, as they were always ‘fighting, sneaking and lazy’ and refused to obey the rules. Women could now be sent to the
Strafblock
just for shortening a dress, shaving eyebrows or cutting their hair, she observed. ‘Strangely enough, many asocials liked such vanities, most of all the lesbians.’ One young girl was sent to the
Strafblock
for laziness. ‘She opens her dress in front of me to show me her breast – eaten away by frost and vermin. Next morning she is dead.’

When a raid on the SS canteen stores took place, the asocials were blamed and all had to stand for hours without food while the block was searched, so they were ‘collapsing like flies’. The search was unsuccessful. ‘Nothing found apart from pathetic secret messages and love letters by the asocials.’

What struck many of the new political Blockovas was not just the disorder in the asocial blocks but the lesbianism, which spread as the overcrowding
crammed bodies close together. Nanda Herberman had no doubt that lesbian sex was most prevalent in the asocial blocks. She watched in astonishment, praying for these ‘lost souls’. ‘They performed the most depraved acts with each other.’

Her explanation was that the women were so ‘morally deprived’ that ‘sexuality was the only thing left for them’. There were no men around. The SS men reviled the women prisoners, and sexual contact meant dismissal. The only other men seen around the camp in the early days were male prisoners brought in from Sachsenhausen and Dachau to build new blocks. So permanent was this male slave labour force that by the summer of 1942 they had been housed in their own barracks, and a small men’s camp had come into being, adjoining the women’s camp towards the back. But the men’s camp was behind the camp wall and ringed with barbed wire; sexual contact was almost impossible, although not unheard of.
^*

The prisoner lesbianism took many forms. Some of the women who came here were already openly gay. Although female homosexuality was not a ground for arrest, a handful were listed on the records as
lesbisch
and wore black triangles. Many confirmed lesbians made no attempt to hide their sexuality, some taking on men’s names – Max, Charlie or Jules – and sometimes preying on others who were not gay but were easily drawn in. Other women offered sex in return for food. Grete knew of a lesbian ‘prostitute’ called Gerda; ‘prisoners brought their rations of margarine and sausage to her’.

As even Nanda acknowledged, however, many of the women turned to sex because they were lonely. Several of the ‘lost souls’ – Gisela, Freda and Thea – even sought affection from Nanda herself. Throwing their arms around her, they ‘shook with pain over their botched lives’. One woman died in Nanda’s arms; she was ‘riddled with disease’. Thea was sick and haunted the block at night scaring the sleeping women. ‘Thea,’ recalled Nanda, ‘you no longer knew what you did.’

One night I lay sleeping on my bunk and you beat me with both fists. You stood there draped with blankets. I wanted to take hold of you, but you began to run and you jumped out of the window and ran, with me and several other inmates behind you until we finally caught you. It was an icy winter night. And the SS came and put Thea in a straitjacket. The SS came with dogs. I had to come with you to the cell building, where a straitjacket was put on you before my eyes. You never made it out of the death house alive.

The ‘work-shy’ Käthe Datz survived the loneliness of the asocial blocks partly because she had a friend, Helga. The two were together when they were shaved. ‘When we left the shower I hardly recognised her. She says: “Hey it’s me.” I said: “Really – is it you?”’ Käthe smuggled in a little comb, and when her hair grew back she used it to put her hair up, and to keep down the nits.

They could have taken anything from me, but not my little comb. I combed my hair every day. You could find red traces, and that finished people off who couldn’t bear to scratch all the time. No ointment was given. You couldn’t go and see a doctor for lice. So they got eczema. I was fine though. I sorted this lice problem out. Others started to give up. They sat in the corner. In the morning the coffee was given out – water with something in it. Many didn’t even get that. When they saw they were almost finished they didn’t give them anything any more. They waited till they died, then carried them away.

The asocials who found solace in sex were evidently no good at keeping their lovemaking quiet. Other prisoners often spoke of beds shaking and even collapsing in the night. And as lesbianism was a crime in the camp (though not outside), many were caught and thrown into the
Strafblock
, where, as Bertha Teege put it, ‘sexual aberrations got out of hand’.

Erika Buchmann, who became Blockova of the
Strafblock
in 1942, said lovemaking in the block was ‘sometimes shameless and unrestrained’, but couples tried to seek privacy too. ‘If you got up at night to use the toilet, you had to wait because the little couples were in the small compartments with the doors locked.’