If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (19 page)

Grete Buber-Neumann was also shocked by the lesbian sex, but she was more sanguine than some others, perhaps because her eyes had been opened in the Gulag. As Grete saw it, the prostitutes there had been far better off, precisely because there were men in the Gulag camps too and they could ‘continue their work’. Here in Ravensbrück the prostitutes, ‘used to long hours and irregular life-styles, were broken and brutalised by the camp discipline’.

More shocking to Grete than the sex was the way the women continually denounced each other. ‘Sworn friendships were sealed one day and broken in squabbling and enmity the next. All day the women accused each other, throwing the vilest insults around. The most wounding insults touch on their professional honour, the accusation that they had charged low rates. “Look who’s talking,” was a typical opening. “Took drunks in a doorway for a mark a time.”’

And yet, as with Nanda, Grete’s criticisms seem to mask affection for these women too. Perhaps this was due to her friendship with Else Krug.

When in the late summer of 1940 Grete had first entered Block 2 and tried to serve the soup, she panicked as the ‘mob’ menaced her. But then, to her amazement, one of the mob stepped out and called for order. ‘A powerful woman with lively brown eyes, a determined chin and a voice like a sergeant major’ was how Grete described her rescuer, who suddenly jumped up on a stool and bellowed: ‘If you don’t line up properly and stop mobbing the new Blockova the pots will go back to the kitchen and no one will get anything.’ It worked like a charm, said Grete. ‘After that I had no further trouble – for the moment.’

So thankful was Grete to the woman who helped her that she remembered her in her memoir. She was called Else Krug. And because she helped Grete, and later befriended her, Else Krug became one of the very few prostitutes in Ravensbrück to be given a name.

Unknown to Grete, a newcomer to Ravensbrück, Else was already a wellknown figure around the camp; she had arrived with the first transport from Lichtenburg and was one of the first black triangles to be given a Kapo job, running the work gang in the kitchen supplies cellar – a job she had so far held on to, despite the communist coup. As a prisoner of some standing in the block, therefore, Else had a place at the top table in the day room at mealtimes, sitting next to the Blockova. It was here that she and Grete had a chance to chat, and get to know each other.

Else would often hark back to her past, talking of life as a prostitute in Düsseldorf, always with a twinkle in her eye. Her speciality had been sado-masochism, which she described in vivid detail. Some days she would turn to Grete and begin – ‘What about a little nature study?’ – and she would reminisce. ‘Up to then I had considered myself a fairly enlightened person,’ Grete recalled, ‘and I’d read a certain amount of scientific literature on the subject, but Else’s stories of the requests she met with in the course of her profession and how she complied with them made my hair stand on end.’

Yet Grete came to admire Else. ‘She told her stories in a dry, matter-of-fact way, and there was a certain professional pride in her attitude. She knew what she was and she insisted she was good at what she did.’ Else never ‘whined’ or claimed as others did that they were going to reform when they got out. Instead she would muse: ‘A few more years of camp and I’ll find it hard to earn 300 marks in a night. Ah well, I’ll have to invent something special to make up for it.’

Grete also learned that Else was very good at managing her kitchen work
gang, and took a pride in it. Work on the gang was highly sought after, as the opportunities to smuggle out extra carrots, potatoes and turnips, and sometimes canned food and jam, were considerable – as too were the risks of being caught, or denounced by a political prisoner trying to muscle in. Probably the main reason Else Krug’s operation had not yet been damaged, despite Hanna Sturm’s smear campaign against asocials, was precisely because she kept her team – all fellow asocials – on a tight rein, making sure that the pickings were fairly shared. Else had become a mother to her kitchen gang, winning their loyalty, observed Grete.

In all their talks, however, Grete never seems to have learned anything about Else’s background, or about her own mother, though Grete often heard about others.

Once a month, like all prisoners, the asocials could write a letter, and one of the Blockova’s jobs was to pre-censor the mail, so they got to read all the letters. Those to mothers were the most heart-rending. One wrote: ‘Dear mother, I know I’ve been a great shame to you but do write me just a word. I’m so unhappy. When I come out I will make a fresh start; really I will. Send me a mark.’ Sometimes on a Saturday, when mail arrived, there would be an unexpected answer for one of them ‘as some mother’s heart had been touched, and the tears would flow in streams, but by Sunday all remorse had been forgotten and the insults would start flying again.’

In most cases, however, the women never heard back, either because their letters never reached their destinations or because the family had disowned them. Some women never wrote at all, perhaps because they had lost touch with their families long ago and never had the courage to tell them what they’d become, or where they were, which seems to have been the story in Else’s case. We know from other sources that Lina Krug, Else’s mother, had no idea where her daughter was.

Families of the asocial prisoners are as impossible to trace as the women themselves. Often they had no fixed address, or were themselves behind bars. After the war, if the missing women did not return, such families tended to stay silent. They may have guessed where their loved ones had been sent, but they saw no purpose in trying to make their voices heard; families received no help or compensation either.

Else’s mother, however, did make her voice heard. After the war she appealed to the German survivors’ body, the communist-run Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN: Organisation for the Victims of Fascism), saying that she sought news of her daughter. Lina Krug seems to have had no idea that her daughter might have been a prostitute, or why she had been arrested. She simply asked the VVN for any information they might have. The letter also set out something of Else’s family background,
revealing a life story that was quite different to the asocial stereotype as found in the Nazi police files.

The letter states
that Elisabeth (Else) was born on 3 March 1900 in Merzig, Saarland, the tiny German state bordering France, and the family lived in the nearby town of Neudorf-Altenkessel. Else’s father, Jacob Krug, was a master tailor, a respected figure in his community.

At some time in the 1920s she left home to live in Düsseldorf. Lina doesn’t explain when or why Else left, but we know from other records that Jacob Krug died young, so Else may have gone to find work when the family lost its breadwinner. In the 1920s, as unemployment rose, young women flocked to the cities to work for wealthy families as domestics.

Why Else fell into prostitution is unclear, but probably, like so many others, she simply needed money. She was hardly going to tell her mother what she was doing, which was probably why the two lost touch. When she became a prostitute is also hard to pinpoint, but we do know – thanks to further remnants of Nazi documents – that by 1938 she was working at a brothel in Düsseldorf. The address was 10 Corneliusstrasse, then in the heart of the town’s red-light district.

As well as the personal files on prostitutes, a number of police logbooks were also pulled from the rubble of German cities, and among them is the daily logbook for 1938 kept by Düsseldorf police. The well-thumbed volume lists every raid on every Düsseldorf brothel carried out that year. The raids happened monthly, and each time about twenty-five regulars were logged in the book and then sent home.

The same addresses and the same names crop up again and again. An address at 10 Corneliusstrasse was often raided. Some of the prostitutes were brought in with a husband, who was often a pimp. Most had a few personal effects – a few Pfennigs and a hat, which they left at the desk and signed for when they were booked in. One of the regulars from 10 Corneliusstrasse also brought a bag, and this was Else Krug.

On the night of 30 July 1938 the brothel at 10 Corneliusstrasse was raided again, but this time the usual suspects were not sent home. They had been arrested under Himmler’s new ‘asocials’ law, one of the very first mass arrests of its kind, which meant they were soon to be sent to Ravensbrück. Before she left the police station, Else Krug signed for her bag in her usual firm, clear hand.

By her second year in Ravensbrück Else must have been out of touch with her mother for at least four years, probably many more. Then she lost any chance to write home even had she wanted to. One by one – thanks to the red triangles’ takeover – the remaining asocial Kapos were ousted from their posts, and when
eventually Else’s smuggling was betrayed, she too lost her job in the kitchen cellar. She was punished with a term in the
Strafblock
, heaving bricks and unpacking coal barges, but it didn’t break her, says Grete, who sometimes snatched a word with her friend through the
Strafblock
wire.

‘Grete,’ said Else once, ‘they think they can get me down with work, but they’re wrong; I’m tough, I can get through it better than any of them.’

The brutality in the
Strafblock
was worse than it had ever been. A new guard, Gertrud Schreiter, a baker’s daughter from Cologne, beat with a leather belt. She ‘became savage’, said the women, and prisoners said later they could recognise the
Strafblock
prisoners because the brutality ‘turned them into beasts’ too – ‘the last remains of any softness vanished from their faces and their posture’.

Towards the end of 1940 Koegel decided to make use of the beasts by ordering them to carry out the thrashings on the
Bock
. So frequent were the thrashings by now that Dorothea Binz and Maria Mandl were overworked, and they needed help. If they agreed, the
Strafblock
women were given extra food and sent back to their ordinary blocks. There was no shortage of volunteers. Nor was there a shortage of hands ready to beat the trapeze artiste Katharina Waitz after she had escaped for the third time.

Following her two earlier attempts, Katharina had been imprisoned in the
Strafblock
for many months, then some time in 1941 she found a way out again. So breathtaking was her escape this time that many prisoners later recounted how she did it. Under cover of darkness, without alerting guards or dogs, she slipped out of the
Strafblock
and reached the SS canteen. She climbed on top of the building and, using a pillow and blanket to protect herself from the current, she scaled the electric fence and jumped down to the ground on the other side. Using all her high-wire skills she clambered over the five rows of barbed wire and up the four-metre-high wall, also using the pillow and blanket to get over the barbed wire at the top. Katharina then leapt to freedom, but by morning the guards had found the blanket in the barbed wire and the pillow on the roof of the canteen.

The prisoners who remembered how Katharina got away also recalled how she was brought back. While she was being hunted, the whole camp was made to stand in punishment, but it was the
Strafblock
she had escaped from that was punished most severely. These women were forced to keep standing, without food, until Katharina was found.

It took three days and nights. On the fourth morning she was discovered hiding out in Fürstenberg. The female guards with dogs sent to hunt her down reappeared, with Koegel close behind, pushing Katharina in front of him. She was bitten all over and covered in blood and dirt.

Doris Maase, observing from the
Revier
window, watched as Koegel took
Katharina to the
Strafblock
, telling the prisoners, crazed with starvation and anger: ‘
There she is
. You can do what you want.’ Another witness heard Koegel say: ‘Let’s bring her to the beasts – let our beasts have fun with her,’ and as soon as he handed Katharina over to the
Strafblock
women ‘the worst of them pushed her into the bathroom, swearing at her, and they beat her to death with chair legs’. Her corpse ‘must have looked terrible’, said Doris Maase, because for the first time in the camp’s history a dead body was taken away by the camp doctor, Dr Sonntag, and his medical orderly, and not by prisoners.

Not long after Katharina’s death, Koegel organised another mass thrashing, and once again the
Strafblock
was involved. The Jehovah’s Witnesses working in the rabbit hutches were refusing to collect angora wool, saying it was being used for soldiers’ coats, and therefore amounted to war work. Koegel flew into a rage and ordered scores of the women to be thrashed, but for such multiple flogging he needed extra hands, so he called on volunteers from the
Strafblock
. Once again, inducements were offered and volunteers came forward, but Koegel needed more.

Perhaps because of her powerful appearance, or because he noticed her haughty pride, Koegel specifically selected Else Krug as one of the thrashers. Like the others she was offered the chance of release from the
Strafblock
, but Else said no. Koegel called Else to his office, and Grete got to hear what happened next.

Koegel was not used to prisoners opposing his orders, so he was furious and shouted at Else, ordering her to obey.

‘No, Herr Camp Commandant,’ said Else. ‘I never beat a fellow prisoner.’

‘What, you dirty whore? You think you can pick and choose? That’s refusal to obey an order.’ Else shrugged, but was grimly determined. ‘Take the whore away,’ snorted Koegel. ‘You’ll have cause to remember me, I can tell you.’

Chapter 7

Doctor Sonntag

O
lga, like all the prisoners, lived in almost constant fear of winter. Only in the earliest weeks of spring was winter absent from her thoughts, but as her letters show, from summer onwards the prospect of the first snows haunted her. ‘For me the life in summer is so much easier and I hope not to spend another winter here,’ she wrote to Leocadia and Ligia in June 1940.